Treasures From My Past

Many of you have been through the sad task of clearing out your parents' house prior to putting it on the market. That's what I've been up to the last 2 days of last week. The process is slowed by the unavoidable lingering over souvenirs and photographs. The brighter side of the experience for me is the huge pile of photographs I brought back to my place which I'll be scanning and organizing the rest of this year.

 I'll be showing you some of the oldies and my attempts to repair some of their looks this week. This one, as you can see from the note on the left, is a remarkably cute little boy photographed by my father in April, 1946.

Lucky for me my dad was an avid photographer. He always had a few cameras and lenses laying around his makeshift dark room in our basement (I grew up in Detroit, MI, where everybody has a basement). That means Mom had a bunch of old photos.



I won't be trying to restore the photographs in the sense that many people take old photos and make them look as if they could be recently made. I'll just be trying to clean up scratches and spots as I did with the above picture.

Here's the result of this first effort. That "car seat" would not pass inspection today.

 

You see? I just cleaned it up a bit and cropped out the border areas. The process included repairs with Adobe's Photoshop CS4 but I used tools that are available in Photoshop Elements. I'm lazy so I like to use the "healing brush" and the "clone stamp" tools to remove scratches and spots by letting the software blend them in with surrounding pixels. Here's a side by side comparison.

I just cleaned it up and removed the color cast. I really like the look of an old photograph in black and white. I did some noise removal on this one. I don't know if you can do that with Elements.

I'll show you some other adjustments I intend to make to this and a few other photographs during the week ahead. That means this week will be more about photograph editing and processing than shooting but that's half of the photographic process. Many of the photographs I rescued from Mom's house are from the 50s, 60s, etc. and are color snapshots. I'll show you what I did to try to save some of those that have a terrible color cast.