Practial Approach To Old Photos

I am not in the retouching business so, as I said Monday, my intent is to fix up my old photos so they look a bit better. I did encounter a quandry when I came upon this photograph and others from the early 70s when my oldest daughter was my only daughter so far.

That's my daughter, Rachel, pushing her cousin, Mickey toward my mom.


This is one of several photographs that really degraded over time. I might have tried to duplicate the color of the grass and the walkway and the skin tones, etc. but no. I decided the best way to improve upon this photo was to remove the color.

It may be that we're much more accustomed to seeing a gray scale photograph so it looks more natural than the red cast version. I just think this is a more easily viewed photograph. The way the red covered the photo in the original version left no way of using the software to just pick out tonal areas and adjust them. I'm not artistic enough to recolor the picture by hand. I tried. Forget about it.

The factors in my thinking included the fact that I have plenty of color photos of Rachel, my daughter, and Mickey, her cousin, and my mom that are in pretty good shape. I just like this picture because it's taken at my parents home in Eastern Detroit from which much of my life took place. If the color cast photos were the only ones I had showing these people I might spend a lot more time and effort in restoration but not in this case.

Remember: You can turn any photograph to a gray scale (black and white) photograph in most photo editing software.

I have so many photographs to choose from, in fact, that I'm saving only those that I think show my family in various key moments and give a sense of their personalities. That's because this guy, my dad, was nuts about photography.

Tomorrow's candidates for improvement include photographs taken before I was around. Yes, they had photography then. Also, I think I know which camera my dad's using in this photograph.