When They Were Young

Still don't have any new stuff worth showing, and have been doing a good bit of scanning old family photos and working on those.

Trying to scan a bunch at a time and when I can't sit there any more, I stop. Then later I try to pull them up one at a time and repair them. I found a box with a big envelope with a bunch of loose prints in it, and that's mostly what I've been scanning on the flatbed scanner.

I try to scan them as high quality as my scanner will allow, work on these huge .tif files as much as I can in 16-bit mode and then at some point convert them to 8-bit due to limitations in Photoshop Elements, and finish working on them.

I tend to key in on the people in the photos, dust specks and scratches on their faces and bodies, and if something is obvious on the background, I'll do a bit of repair there too, but I don't worry about that as much as the people themselves.

The first photo here is one of my mother when she was 15 years old. It was marked on the back of the photo that it was taken in July of 1950, which makes her having just turned 15. I don't know what the occasion for the dress was, but I got a kick out of this one with her being a bit younger than in most of the photos I have of her. This print was pretty scratched and I worked on it until I got sick of it, which ususally coincides with my back hurting from sitting at the computer a long time, and I stopped and declared it done.

The second photo made me laugh. That's my Dad when he was 18, just before leaving home for the US Navy. That's his little sister, my Aunt Gayle, sitting there next to him. It was taken in August of 1952. They both look pretty mean in the photo, which is what makes me laugh when I look at it. I don't know if they were caught unaware and hadn't smiled or if they were truly upset about something. This one was in much better shape than the one above of my mother. This one was still in a flip book with a cover along with other photos and had been better protected over the years.

Let’s Get This Party Started (again)

Thanks to all of you for your kind comments, thoughts, and prayers for my brother.

He’s doing somewhat better, and they moved his surgery back from this past Thursday to this coming Tuesday. They are just going to repair his nose. His cheek bone is not going to be fixed. Apparently, doing work to try to repair the cheek is done by entering the ear area pushing the bones outward from the inside. It’s an incredibly hard surgery and one of those times when the cure can be much worse than the disease.

I think he’s decided to forego the cheek surgery and just have his nose put back together. Again, that happens this coming Tuesday, August 21.

I would appreciate it if you guys kept on praying for him. And while you're at it, please pray for my younger daughter, who is 18. She's having a pretty involved surgery of a female nature this Wednesday, and I'd appreciate your prayers for her too.

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This is a before and after photo of my Dad when he was in the US Navy in the mid-1950s. I spent a lot of time on this one. I blew it up huge and worked on it section by section to make it as good as I could.

I haven't been out photographing things in over a week, but have been doing some scanning some old family photos.

This is all flatbed scanner stuff which necessitates cleaning up dust specs and repairing discoloration and tears and whatnot.

It's a useful thing to do in my present frame of mind, and does two things at once.

It requires concentration that takes my mind off of things like worrying about my brother and daughter.

It's also fun to do when I'm not in a very creative mode. Instead of feeling guilty for not getting out and taking lots of new photos, I get to do something useful to help reduce the mountain of scanning and repair work I have tasked myself with doing.

So get ready for more of this, until I can get back into the groove of taking photos. I'll try to comb my archives for stuff y'all haven't seen as well.

I'll be getting around to visiting and commenting again as soon as I can.

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.