Image Assignment
I'm having a hard time finding images that relate to my project, so I was very excited to see an email my wife received from her mother that included a collection of old photographs of her (my wifes) grandmother and other relatives that had died before she was born. Unfortunately for the photographs, but fortunately for me, some of these needed some retouching and repairing.
The other issue I ran into, was that I don't own a copy of Photoshop, and never probably will (unless someone gives me a copy). I'm a big user of free and open source software. Free, because that's what I can afford. Open Source, because those are usually the free programs. So I turned to my trusty, rusty copy of
The Gimp, image manipulation program, comparable to Photoshop. I was a bit apprehensive about how the things we learned in class would transfer to this other program. But surprisingly the problem was not trying to figure out how to 'translate' between programs, it was trying to remember how to even do it in the first place! The only part I couldn't remember was creating a 'matted' image.Anyhow... here is the narrative of what I did.
Retouch, Restore, and Vignette
First came the image of my wife's grandmother she never was able to meet. Initially this image had a few holes, and some color disfiguration across her face.
The first step was to desaturate the image (remembering that we don't want to use black and white). That got rid of the color disfiguration nicely. Then I used the ol' stamp tool to remove the 'holes'. After playing around with colors, layers, that multiply setting, and a bunch of other things (I think I tweaked the levels in there somwhere too) I created a slightly darker and more enhance, cleaned up image.
This would have been a good image to do the matte and the vignette, but I just did the vignette. That trick with the ruler lines to create the oval is awesome. I have always fretted drawing ovals and the like, but that tip makes it a breeze.
A little color, please
Next came the image of my wife's grandmother and her mother (that would be my wife's great-grandmother) in fashionable '20s clothing. Even though they looked mighty dapper as they were, I decided they could use a bit 'o color.
First I desaturated the image and messed around with the levels and such. Then using the regular lasso tool (the nifty one that does the outlining for you was giving me too much grief) I outlined the sections I wanted to colorize. Again a nifty trick from class was helpful here. Being able to add and subtract to the current selection was something I had always wanted to do, and finally I know how. Anyhow, with the selections made and a big brush with a light color, and with gentle, sweeping strokes, I was able to apply a little yellow here, a bit of blue there, and a touch of green to the background. I used the burn tool to even out the hard lines of the green background, allowing it to fade and flow into the darker area. Finally a little skin tone to the faces and hand add a more life like feel to the photo. It looks pretty neat, I think.
Would you like some matte with your engraving, Sir?
Last and probably least (although I might be able to use it for my project) came an engraving. Firstly, this engraving depicts a usually neglected truth, chicks dig guys who study books. That's why I study history, right!?
This image needed some croping and resizing. I also turned it into a black and white with the trusty desaturate trick. Here's where the matting would have come in really handy. -- Brain, where are you when I need you.....? -- I had to settle with the ol' erasure for now. I'm hoping someone - cough Prof. P cough - will be kind enough to show us how to do that again in class. So for now, here's what we get.
And with that, I'm now a photo editing pro... right?
