Most of September has been warm and
sunny without the suffocating humidity of summer and, as usual, the
garden has been calling my name and, as always, I´ve been
responding. It couldn´t last of course but I made the most of it
while the weak autumn sun was shining. The past week though has been
mostly rainy with horrific thunder storms with a sound like large
pieces of furniture falling downstairs. At the first indication of a
storm I always raced around the patio grabbing my beautiful gerbera
daisies and putting them in a sheltered place where they couldn´t be
battered down by torrential rain. Ditto Dora who´s always reluctant
to come indoors in any weather!
So much for outdoor activities. When
the weather´s really bad like today I find the best way to forget
about it is to do some photo editing.
Some of you may remember that I had to
fly to Scotland on Christmas Day to arrange my mother´s funeral. It
was a sad occasion made even sadder by the discovery of several
photos of my mother which must have lain forgotten at the bottom of a
drawer for many years. I brought them home and put them away and it´s
only now that I can bear to look at them. There´s one I´d never
seen before which I find particularly appealing in which she´s
standing in a garden, obviously so aware of the fact that she´s been
told not to move that she´s standing at attention like a little
soldier.
As you can see, considering how old it
is, the photo is remarkably undamaged.
However, it´s very faded and has very
little contrast. I´m no expert at photo restoration and usually have
to resort to lots of tedious and frustrating trial and error (mostly
error) so I was amazed when I immediately discovered that Auto Tone
worked instantly by adding the necessary contrast.
Unfortunately, it also meant that the
photo lost some of its vintage sepia colour in the lighter parts like the dress and the sky. Again I was amazed that my very
first attempt, namely the use of the sepia photo filter, restored
just the touch of the warm colour it needed while toning down the rest of the photo.
After studying it for a while
with a critical eye it occurred to me that all those little spotty
white dots in the foreground rather distracted the eye from the focal
point. I used a combination of the appropriately named spot healing brush and the clone
tool to edit them out...and that was it really. What I deliberately
didn´t do was try to remove all the blotches and scratches,
mainly in the sky, only those which were distracting as I´ve learned
from experience that overworking an old photo can deaden it. Anyway,
for better or for worse, here´s the final result.
I know that all vintage photos aren´t
as easy to improve as this one – you may remember my struggles to
edit THIS horror! - but if you´ve never even attempted to edit a
photo I hope this will inspire you to at least give it a go.
