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Another family photo restored. Street Prophets Coffee Hour. [1]

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Date: 2023-10-07  

Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour, the place where politics meets up with religion, art, science, nature, history, and life. Come in, have a cuppa and a cookie (or several!) and join us.

I use a very old photo processing program. You don’t need fancy equipment or software to do good photo restoration. My siblings and most of my cousins aren’t much interested in pictures. They’ll look at them but then their attention goes on to other things. One cousin does ask about the pictures, because she didn’t ask in years past. I don’t think she retains much, though, and she’ll have to ask again.

Anyway, this photo was in her father’s things when he passed in February of 2022 at 94. Yes, I had to tell her it was her own mother, born in 1927 so the picture was taken about 1931. My cousin didn’t even know that our mothers were passed from one family member to another when things became difficult for their divorced mother. Sometimes it was truly an unfortunate placement. Other times, they landed in a good, healthy situation.

This is one of the good times. The man is my grandmother’s uncle, Ben Mayes, on a farm in northwestern Arkansas, that was bought by Ben’s father in 1880 and is still in the family today.

I have no idea why I can’t enlarge this picture and I don’t have the original, but you get the idea of where I was starting. It’s a normal 4”X6”, discolored and with some damage.

The rest of the pictures are a normal size, thank goodness. Okay, first I cropped out the excess scenery. That took out a good deal of damage, too. When you do this, be careful to include as much of the people as you can. Unfortunately, the edge of Ben’s foot was cut off in the original, and there’s not much I can do about that. But I did leave a bit of space above his head.

First, I repaired that big crack on the lower left corner.

Converting to black and white and then using levels to broaden the dynamic range makes the picture clearer. Don’t try to sharpen these too much or you may have artifacts on the image that you don’t want. Do this even if you want the final picture to have the sepia tone. It wasn’t an artistic choice at the time but was added as a way to stabilize the photo and make the image last longer without bronzing or silvering out. It does have a certain nostalgic feel to it and I think it’s better when used with portraits rather than snapshots.

If you want to put the color back in (I didn’t), use your photo program to overlay a solid color layer with the tint you want, then reduce the opacity until it’s to your liking.

We’re having some true fall weather today so taking new pictures may be limited, but there is good sun so I’ll go out back to the woods and pasture if it warms up some after last night’s 30s.

While you’re here, check out this week’s Community Needs List. Maybe there’s someone you can help over a hump.

This is an open thread. All topics are welcome.

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