Alan_One
04-23-2005, 04:27 PM
I'm a big fan of popular culture. Not so much the "Pop" culture we think of these days but more the social evolution traditions habbits customs etc. Every day we create artifacts that capture a moment or an activity. A cigarrette butt, a soda can, a post it note, can all be testaments to a moment in an existence. You can say it's trash. And it is. But a lot the stuff we dig up in archeological excavations was trash at some point.
Photographs to me are the best way of capturing a moment. Better than writing about it or filming it. Better than recalling it from memory. With a photograph every individual can experience that one moment on their own terms. We can see our own picture even when we're all looking at the same image.
So anyway, the point of this post is that I'm in the process of restoring an old photograph from a pile of old photographs that my wife had in an envelope. This old picture had been torn and taped back together. The details of how it got this way are sketchy but within this picture you can see my father in law as an infant in the arms of his mother.
Occasionally I do this as part of my profession but this one is completely recreational and without a deadline. So I'm going to update this thread as the work progresses and share the process.
Hope there's some kind of entertainment in it for you guys.
1st: The pieces
http://alan.socaleuro.com/r/paisan_pieces.jpg
2nd: The pieces are scanned individually and reassembled in PS. The settings I used were 8 bit greyscale at 600dpi. The reason for these settings is that I want a decently high DPI but I don't want to make the image harder to manipulate by adding useless CMYK or RGB information. After all, it's a black and white image. We'll be doing a little duotone conversion later but that's later. The assembly sounds simple but getting the pieces to align correctly can take a bit. Sometimes you start thinking that one piece shrunk or that the scanner registered on piece bigger than the other. That's never the case. If your pieces don't line up then they aren't put together right. Getting this set of 3 pieces took me over an hour. Lots of times it's hit or miss and registering + making sure you scan both pieces at the same level is key. You don't want to be rotating and registering too much in PS. All the levels and contrast editing is left till the end as well. Here's the initial assembly. The assembly should be done in PS and not by hand or with tape or glue. That would damage the picture further. With an image like this I want to handle it as little as possible.
http://alan.socaleuro.com/r/paisan.jpg
Going back to that artifact thing I was talking about. Scanning is a great way to get deep into the content of an old photo. I've already mentioned that the baby in the picture is my father in law who is now 61. Blowing up a section of the table we get a good look at the cigarrette fashion of the day.
http://alan.socaleuro.com/r/paisan_detail.jpg
Next up is going to be removing the tears from the image. I'll be doing that with the clone tool in PS same goes for all the dust scrathes a speckling which isn't necessarily handled with filters (unless you're lazy and you don't care about image quality. When I'm done I want this to look like a vintage silver print.
Someday
Photographs to me are the best way of capturing a moment. Better than writing about it or filming it. Better than recalling it from memory. With a photograph every individual can experience that one moment on their own terms. We can see our own picture even when we're all looking at the same image.
So anyway, the point of this post is that I'm in the process of restoring an old photograph from a pile of old photographs that my wife had in an envelope. This old picture had been torn and taped back together. The details of how it got this way are sketchy but within this picture you can see my father in law as an infant in the arms of his mother.
Occasionally I do this as part of my profession but this one is completely recreational and without a deadline. So I'm going to update this thread as the work progresses and share the process.
Hope there's some kind of entertainment in it for you guys.
1st: The pieces
http://alan.socaleuro.com/r/paisan_pieces.jpg
2nd: The pieces are scanned individually and reassembled in PS. The settings I used were 8 bit greyscale at 600dpi. The reason for these settings is that I want a decently high DPI but I don't want to make the image harder to manipulate by adding useless CMYK or RGB information. After all, it's a black and white image. We'll be doing a little duotone conversion later but that's later. The assembly sounds simple but getting the pieces to align correctly can take a bit. Sometimes you start thinking that one piece shrunk or that the scanner registered on piece bigger than the other. That's never the case. If your pieces don't line up then they aren't put together right. Getting this set of 3 pieces took me over an hour. Lots of times it's hit or miss and registering + making sure you scan both pieces at the same level is key. You don't want to be rotating and registering too much in PS. All the levels and contrast editing is left till the end as well. Here's the initial assembly. The assembly should be done in PS and not by hand or with tape or glue. That would damage the picture further. With an image like this I want to handle it as little as possible.
http://alan.socaleuro.com/r/paisan.jpg
Going back to that artifact thing I was talking about. Scanning is a great way to get deep into the content of an old photo. I've already mentioned that the baby in the picture is my father in law who is now 61. Blowing up a section of the table we get a good look at the cigarrette fashion of the day.
http://alan.socaleuro.com/r/paisan_detail.jpg
Next up is going to be removing the tears from the image. I'll be doing that with the clone tool in PS same goes for all the dust scrathes a speckling which isn't necessarily handled with filters (unless you're lazy and you don't care about image quality. When I'm done I want this to look like a vintage silver print.
Someday