My grandmother seems to have a hideaway somewhere that she keeps all sorts of old pictures and artifacts from my father’s past. Almost every time she comes over she has a small ziplock bag with an old picture, newspaper article, or other piece of the past. Last week she brought an old and worn out color picture of my Dad’s baseball team (the rio grand ramblers I believe…). The pic was faded and yellow with some scratches and fold marks on the surface, but was still a very nice picture. I had Tracy scan it and send it to me, and I played around with it a little bit today. I think the pic was taken around 1965 or so.
This is the origional pic. At this reduced size it is hard to see the fold marks and black specks and scratches in the sky portion of the photo.
This was the first stage of fixing the photo up. I removed some of the marks and scratches, and corrected the colors to their original form.
Next it was time to add some color back to the sky:
It wouldn’t be a Zach pic if I didn’t do at least one black and white version. I played around with the new black and white adjustement that comes with Photoshop CS3. It lets you individually adjust each portion of the spectrum. For this, I turned all of the blues very black, whlile making the reds and yellows more white.
Finally, a combo black and white/color pic. The technique is very simple. Duplicate the color layer, and desaturate the top layer and adjust it so you get the black and white look you are looking for. Then just erase the portion of the top layer that you want to be in color…and you are done.
