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Feb. 18, 2004

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Here, again, you can see some work I did. Touching up old photos is challenging and actually quite fun for me. 

This one had some interesting challenges for me. Its always fairly easy to brush over small scratches, tears and blemishes. But some of the conditions of this old photo had me perplexed. The easiest of all old, black and white images, is returning the image to actual black and white. This just happens when you scan it as grayscale. The sepia tone is gone. I have, previously, kept and worked with the sepia tone where a customer wanted to retain the actual antique look. 

A major problem with this image was that the original photo had oxidized and had somewhat of a strange silver shine to the surface. This didn't appear to be a problem until I went to scan it. The light from the scanner was reflected back and presented me with a bad haze over the whole image. Just behind the girl's legs you can see a small fingerprint smudge that didn't appear to have any silver oxide. This gave me the idea. If the fingerprint didn't oxidize, then the oil from the finger may have kept this from happening. I took a small touch of oil and spread it over a corner of the image. The oxide glare went away. I then did this lightly over the whole image to remove all the glare and scanned it. The glare eventually came back several hours later, after the picture had dried. All except for the remaining fingerprint smudge. But I got the scan as best as I could.

I easily brushed out all the small imperfections and restored most of the image. The most difficult part was recreating the floor in front of the girl, where the picture was almost destroyed. To try to appease the customer I was almost ready to completely crop off the bottom and not worry about it. However, for my own conscience, I worked tediously, copying a smidgen here and a tad there, to give it the lighting, shading, and dimension that I feel it needed. Thus retaining as much of the original print as possible. 

I printed fifteen 5X7 glossy prints, saved the images to a CD, and gave them all to the customer who seemed very pleased to be able to hand these out, as gifts, to other members of their family.