No Sweating With The Oldies

Here's another look at my family's past as I show you what I do to fix up and clean up some of the wonderful old photographs I saved from my mom's house as we prepared it for sale last week.

This is my uncle Sam, actually my dad's cousin, on a sunny day on Belle Isle, in the middle of the Detroit River. This was taken in 1938, probably during the Summer.

These were people of fairly meager means. My dad's parents were Syrian immigrants  who had moved to Detroit from Johnstown, PA, in search of work in the factories. They worked hard and played hard. All indications are that my uncle Sam, handsome devil that he was, played just as well as he worked.


This is another photograph on which I just wanted to remove the color cast. In the black and white converter in Photoshop you have the chance to adjust the look of the photo by moving color sliders representing the colors that were in the original. In this original you have a little red and a little yellow. You can tell which colors are there to work with by moving the sliders in the adjustment window. That allowed me to adjust the brightness of some parts of the image.

 

With a little spot removal and some brightness adjusting I came up with an acceptable grayscale image. Then I tried a little sharpening.

I'm not sure the sharpening was an improvement. Here's one more probably from the same picnic in 1938.

This one also needs some cleaning and some tonal adjusting. That sky is blown out so I think I'll just loose a bunch of it and crop to highlight the group. That's my dad on the left.

My dad would kill me for showing a photograph of him before he had his nose job around 1940.

To review: you can remove the color cast from B/W originals just by going back to grayscale in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Then you can use one of many adjustments to work on brightness and contrast to try to bring up some shadow detail or calm down some blown out highlights. You will also have a couple of tools for hiding or blending away most of the scratches or tears.

You're pretty much stuck with whatever size at which you can scan your old images. Depending on the resolution of your scanner they won't stand too much enlarging before you start to get blurring and pixels.