Black and White #17

I loved the way the sunlight made this palm frond glow. I thought the contrast would also make a nice black and white version.

The second photo is of the flag pole and tower of the Melbourne Beach, Florida town complex which houses it's fire department, town hall, and it's police department. Again, another contrasty shot I wanted to see in black and white.

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You can see the color versions of these two shots on my other blog, Least Significant Bits, today.

Photo Editing On Computer

Folks, I'm sorry for not posting yesterday, and not visiting much lately. We've been having work done on our home, and this week it was paint (next week too). They painted in the rooms where we have our old, and my new computers, so both were unhooked.

Friday night, I finally got them put back together, after stealing a circuit card out of the old computer so that I can input video into my new one.

Anyway, I'm back up an running finally, but am way behind on preparing photos, taking photos, and selecting some to post.

Here's another before and after of a photo of my maternal grandparents, Henry and Hilda Hinton, taken in the early or mid 1950s.

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The past couple of posts have been about photo restoration and repair. I thought I would answer a couple of comments that were left for me, and use the answers as a post. How's that for lazy?

photowannabe and bluemountainmama said: "I must learn photoshop. My folks had many slides that need help." and "how did you do this? did you scan them into your computer and then photoshop?"

bluemountainmama and photowannabe - Yes, I scanned them into the computer. I have a Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II film/slide scanner that is designed specifically to do just that, scan either 35mm slides or 35mm negatives into digital form. It's the most accurate way to scan, much better and more detailed than scanning a printed photo on a flatbed scanner. But I also have and use an Epson Perfection 2400 Photo flatbed scanner that is EXCELLENT. I love it.

The only problem with the slides in Wednesday's post was that they are square images from 126 film (I think). So I actually scanned the Citrus Tower and Silver Dollar City Train with my flatbed scanner, which can do slides, but isn't as good as my Minolta scanner is. But, I was able to scan the whole square on the flatbed scanner, whereas they Minolta thought I was using typical 35mm slides and only would scan a 35mm sized rectangle.

Once they are scanned, I use Photoshop Elements, which is a $80 software program as opposed to "real" Photoshop CS3, which is a $600 program.

The first thing I do, once an image is scanned, is to open it with Elements and use the "Levels" tool to point out to the program 3 separate points on the image. One is a spot that "should be" absolutely black, but isn't. Then I select a spot that "should be" absolutely white, but isn't. And finally, I select a spot that "should be" a medium gray.

When those three points are selected carefully, and it takes practice to do so, the image is almost perfectly color corrected. It can literally take me now only one minute from opening a color shifted slide as shown today, to making it look printable.

On photos in otherwise good shape, that is all I have to do to make a dramatic change.

After using levels to color correct, I might have to adjust the brightness, contrast, and color saturation a little, but usually this is only "tweaks" as the real problem of the color shift was fixed.

After that, I look at the image blown up huge on my monitor to identify dust specs and little things that might have stuck to an old slide or negative, and use the "Healing Brush" tool to pick off, so to speak, the dust specks.

What results, from just a couple of minutes work, is a totally rejuvenated image.

Doing image repairs, where part of the picture is torn as in the case of scanned print from a flatbed scanner, is much more difficult and time consuming.

I have a whole lot of images on my computer, just awaiting my working on them. So on any given day, I might feel like digging deep and repairing torn photos that I've scanned, while other days, I just want to have fun, and repairing an undamaged slide that has color shifted, like today's, is fun and quick.

I can do the work that matches my mood.

Black and White #16 : Wrestling Angels

A while back, I posted a couple of pics of a porcelain angel Lovely Wife has in the house.

I was in the mood to play around with stuff in Photoshop Elements and used one of the more constrasty angel photos, and converted it to black and white.

I also tried out some of Element's special effects filters, something I've not done very much because I can't use them to create much that I end up liking. But this angels looked quite dreamy anyway so I made her glow, which, to me, kind of fit her looks. Not great, but kinda neat.

Black and White #15

Another couple of shots in the old section of Melbourne, Florida.

A little, tiny park with benches near a train crossing. There are many, many little parks like this throughout Brevard County. Little bitty fellers; this one I would estimate is about 1500 square feet, about the size of my home's footprint. Small, well-kept patches of greenery and flowers.

And the interesting lamps lined up on the front of this store.

Black and White #14

The top photo is out by our pool, where our cat Sassy is one the prowl. Could be lizards. She's a deadly lizard hunter. This is her My-Daddy-is-out-here-with-me-let-me-show-off-for-him-by-finding-something-that-needs-killin'-so's-I-can-kill-it-for-him pose.

The second photo is a black and white version of an outrageous red hibiscus blossom I wandered across.

Black and White #13

Both the bridge and the boy fishing were photographed at Sebastian Inlet State Park.

I tried some different things with the bridge one, but it still didn't turn out as good as I'd hoped to make it. Oh well, such is life, and photography. The scene is looking eastward toward the mainland of Florida, through the inlet that passes under the bridge.

Lovely Wife hates the Gaussian blur / Orton process photos like she used to hate my colored filters back in my Cokin Filter System days. You just can't please some people, can you?

Black and White #12

Both photos are scanned Kodachrome slides, converted to B&W, and fiddled with in Elements.

I kinda liked the dreamlike look of the top one, handled much as yesterday's two photos were.

The bottom one, I ended up adding in some grain as if it were taken on fast B&W film.

Update: I forgot to mention that both photos were taken in Petit Jean State Park in Arkansas in 1983.

Black and White #11

I took these two photos on my lunch break at work one day when I went to the beach.

They were taken with my Nikon D70s, in color, and were decent, but I was playing around with them in Photoshop Elements 4.0 and came up with this spooky midnight, full-moon look and liked it.

What do y'all think?

The plants you see, and that have some bare limbs are sea grapes that grow all along the ocean here on the dunes. They make great defense against the dunes blowing away, but were heavily damaged in the hurricanes of 2004. Their mixture of dead and live sections make for interesting shapes in black and white photos.

I personally love sea grapes (the plant, they don't produce edible grapes) and Lovely Wife and my Mother in Law bought me a small plant the year after we moved here. It's planted in our back yard and fared much better in the two hurricanes that made almost a direct hit on us in 2004, for the simple reason our home protected it from the worst of the wind.

Black and White #9

On Saturday, Lovely Wife and I ran errands, bought furniture, and in general wore ourselves out.

We went to the old downtown Melbourne, Florida area to eat lunch at Meg O'Malley's and this consignment store was across the street and they had all kinds of stuff out on the sidewalks and the insides of the store had every kind of household item that you could think of. Old flour sifters and dishes like our grandparents and great grandparents had; furniture, and also totem poles and this incredible carved piece of wood.

The face was carved into a root system of a small tree that had been pulled up and dried (I guess) and I tried to convert it to black and white and to give it the look and feel of seeing it at night under the light of a bright full moon. It's funny how some photos are black and white in your mind before you even press the shutter button.

The totem poles were all bunched together in the very back corner of the store, and although the color version looks really good too, I liked this high contrast black and white version a bit better.

Black And White #8

The originals of these, of course, are in color. I liked them, but they weren't very exciting. I liked the high contrast though.

Now that I'm getting a bit better with my black and white conversions, I remembered these and went back and tried to work a little magic on them.

Well, I like 'em.

They are some sort of palmetto or something palm-like that are growing in front of my favorite Brevard County Public Library branch. Someone cut off all of the points ath the ends, and went a little farther inward on them and cut these fronds into circles.

I love the hazy focus look that Anna of Anna's Photo of the Day, and John of My Viewfinder do with their photos, but I couldn't get a hazy focus on these that I liked. I was wondering why, and it hit me that the good Orton process looking photos are the ones that have some humanity in them, or are a beautiful scene to begin with. I'm thinking there's nothing inherently beautiful or human about these trimmed palmettos. Maybe that's why the Orton process looks goofy to me on them.

(Warning, Rant ahead: I thought these looked kinda nifty, though I suspect they're really trimmed this way to keep some knucklehead from poking themselves and either complaining or suing the library. You can't underestimate folk's stupidity and vindictiveness these days. End of rant.)

Black And White #3

A couple more photos from my time in B&W photography classes when I was in college the first time in the early 80s.

Nothin' special, I guess I was in an artsy fartsy mood when taking these.

Canon AE-1 and 50mm f1.8 lens. I'm pretty sure they were on Pan-X (125 ASA), but I didn't look to see for sure when I scanned them.

Black and White #1: Movement

The top photo is of my Dad, chilling on the couch at home.

The bottom one is of Younger Brother, bunny hopping on his BMX bike on the street in front of our house.

I consider my home town to be Monroe, Louisiana. I went to Neville High School there, and also my first degree is an Associate of Arts Degree from Northeast Louisiana University (now the University of Louisiana - Monroe).

When I was in high school, I was a photographer on the yearbook staff. I learned black and white darkroom techniques and developed photos for the yearbook at school.

Later, when I was in college the first time, in the early 1980s, I took a couple of B&W photography classes for fun. These two photos are scans of B&W negatives from one of my college photography classes.

Taken around 1982-1983. Canon AE-1, 50mm f1.8 lens, Tri-X.