Comment

Comment by Jason Edge on February 4, 2016 at 1:17am

Chris, I had to use the clone tool where the phone pole went next to the car but for the main section of the pole (and lines in the air), I simply used the scratch remove. Just widen the tool larger than the pole and it magically fills in the pole. This works great where you have fairly solid background. Even if it a bit lighter on left of pole and darker on right of pole, it will blend the color across the selected area. The clone tool is great because you can use adjust the opacity, density and hardness settings to pick up one area of the picture and fill in another.  The Paint Shop Pro I use also has a simple makeover tool that is helpful for simple blemishes.  The salt & pepper and despeckle filters, moire pattern removal tool, and vibrancy tools are a few that I often use. I love to work on old family pictures and am really just stepping into the many things you can do. Once you get into the "effects" tools, you can really do some neat stuff there. I have used some effects on the old black and white (actually grey scale) data book scans to put some pizzazz to the pictures. 

Well, enough about that. I will leave you with one other before and after pictures I wanted to include in the newsletter of Margaretha Forsman helping install the coil springs!  I loved the entire picture with the extra stuff on the ground and keep a  "full" copy of all of my master pictures because I think why throw away part of a picture unless it is garbage.  For the newsletter I like to crop in to save space and wanted to pull Margaretha in a bit to make the picture a bit more personal.  Here is the before and after on that picture:

Comment by Chris Codd on February 3, 2016 at 7:01pm

You're pretty handy with that clone tool. I use Photoshop CS5 and I really need to upgrade my programs/computer, but it gets the job done. Shopping the pole out of that picture for the cover was a good call. It would have been too distracting. 

Comment by Jason Edge on February 3, 2016 at 9:27am

Note for the 2nd picture with Margaretha, I could have also easily taken out the lines and phone pole with the scratch remover and clone tool. This was not a cover photo, so other than cropping in and restoring the picture quality some I left the lines in, and didn't alter content in the picture. I just pulled it up and it took about 5 minutes to take those lines out:

Comment by Jason Edge on February 3, 2016 at 9:11am

Chris, nothing wrong with that.  To make pictures in the newsletter pop, especially old pictures, I will take out noise, then resharpen, then if old faded color, run through the fade clarifier (if using my Paint Shop Pro... or just notch up the saturation a bit if using the Photo Gallery Editor).  Another trick is to take out shadows, and increase highlights and contrast a bit. Sometimes adjusting mid tones up or down a bit can help.  It is funny but the one thing I almost never touch which I use to always go straight to when I was younger was brightness.  I'll also often use the crop tool to zoom in or make several pictures out of one. Here are a couple of examples from our Newsletter.

Here is our cover photo for this month's newsletter. Note that in addition to cropping in to get the photo I wanted and taking out the digital noise then resharpening I took out the phone pole and power line to the right!

 

Margaretha Forsman in 1974 Before and after. Here I cropped in and took out some of the brownish color fade, and slightly adjusted the shadows, noise and contrast.

Comment by Chris Codd on February 3, 2016 at 12:07am

Thanks Jason. I cheat a little bit and bump the saturation up a notch once in awhile haha. 

Comment by Jason Edge on February 2, 2016 at 11:21pm

Fantastic picture.  You always have the coolest pictures.