20% Time 5/5/08

Since I am slowly finding out that the amount of new stuff that I can actually learn online is becoming more and more restricted as the weeks pass, I have become more and more challenged to think of things that I can do.  Fortunately, this month is my parents anniversary and I have been chosen for several projects dealing with getting everything ready.  So, the first thing I wanted to do was actually to try restoring some of their wedding pictures from 35 years ago.

The first thing I realized on Tuesday is that either no freelancers know how to restore pictures, or those that actually know don’t really want to give out ‘trade secrets’ or something like that.  I did not enter any forums for fear of being deemed snoopy or unsportsmanlike etc.  Fortunately for me, my brother actually used to work for OCB and used to actually do restorations quite often.  Now, when I say restoration, I do not mean colorizing black and white pictures, I mean putting colors back into aging photos that are turning sepia and getting speckled.  So I quizzed him and pretty much found out that “Levels are your friend”.  By getting the scanning the picture, opening it up, and then redistributing the levels to balance the colors, the picture will regain nearly all of the original color.

For the first picture, I did all this but still needed to do some selective stuff.  First, the hand on my dad was way too pale and I had to go use the lasso tool and a color balance layer to match it to the rest of him.  Then, the shoulder on his suit was too light compared to the rest of it.  On the next picture, I had to repeat the first process, then had to go and actually adjust all the background shadows in order to see my parents a bit better.  Then, I finished the photos up by taking the clone stamp tool at about ten pixels and cleaned up any really grainy areas, or smudges, scratches, etc.  I probably spent about an hour for both, the techniques are really easy.  From here, I might use them for invitations, email them to my brothers for prints, or whatever. 

Click for a closer view…

For future entries, I might be experimenting on Blend…