The Photographs

When viewing these photos, you will notice that many of them have a slightly brown, almost sepia color tone to them. Others show some damage in the form of tears, stains, physical deterioration, and assorted other visual imperfections.

Today’s image editing programs offers a photo restorer an ability to repair many of the worst damage to photographs, given the time to work on them. We can also change brightness and contrast levels on photographs. Using the Levels tool in Photoshop, for instance, I can move and stretch the brightness levels of an image. I can adjust brightness, contrast, and tonal range by specifying the location of complete black, complete white, and midtones.

Before, during, and after the photo scanning process, I have spent much time restoring many of these photos from their original worn, or damaged states. However, because digital restoration, including adjusting levels, can create loss in resolution, even in slight degrees, I decided against doing it with every photo of my mother. The best example of my conservative approach is evident in the volume of photos that remain with a light brown hue as opposed to a starker, or crisper white background.

With much experimentation, I realized that the visual trade-off of converting her photos to crisp white backgrounds, was a loss of resolution. Not a big loss (In fact, many of you would probably not notice it.), but, a loss that bothered me enough to hold off from full scale conversion.

A second reason I held off was that I knew that many of these photos had a native off white hue to them anyway from the original photo paper. A substantial number of them were directly scanned from large format studio camera prints, and I just felt it better to leave them alone, except in the worst cases of damage or imagery.

There are many more news clips, tattered magazine pages, and photocopies that are also not very good. As time permits, I will work to restore these and upload. For now, I want to post, and share, what I have worked on.

I believe the feeling and breadth of Mom’s work already shines through strongly from this collection, just as it is.
After all, it starts with a face. 🙂