I have been having all kinds of fun lately scanning old family photos and working with digitized versions of old home movies. And it is funny, but as I get into a particular photo I start to see things that I wish were different. And through the magic of Photoshop, and most especially the greatly improved Refine Edge feature, they can be. Below is a photo of my parents that was taken in 1965. I can remember when this photo was taken. The church my folks belonged to was photographing the membership for inclusion in a photo member directory (this was a big deal in 1965), and all of us sat for this series of photos. For years this photo sat in a picture frame on a desk in my folk's home, so the original color was pretty well faded 45 years later.
The image is in pretty good shape and I got a real decent scan. When I opened it up in Photoshop I had some minor dust and scratches to zap out with the Clone tool. I used a Curves layer and a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer to improve contrast (I know, a little unorthodox to use both, but it worked and saved a lot of time). Since the color was pretty well washed out I just decided to make this a black and white image, and used a Black and White Adjustment layer to take care of that piece. So far, so good.
But the part I didn't like about this image was this cheesie striped background. That may have worked in 1965 but I felt it detracted from the overall image in 2010, and it had to go. So the next step was to make a selection of my parents, and then fill in the background with something more suitable.
And this was where the Refine Edge improvements just rocked. I'm not going to go into the details of the Refine Edge upgrade here. I'll just point you to the first thing I did: view this excellent instructional vid that Photoshop CS5 referred me to:
And below you can see the result! I played with a couple of different backgrounds and finally settled on a grey to white gradient, which really looks nice and helps to draw the viewers's eye more to my folks and less to the background. It's as if the photographer used a go-bo'ed light on the background behind my folks, something he definitely did not do. He did do a good job of lighting my folks though, and once we tamed down the background, the image just sparkled.
We can do so much now with old images to give them the polish and sheen that they deserve, and make our memories just shine. If you are interested in doing this with your family photographs or home movies just let me know. I can help you do this with a personalized approach. Feel free to contact me at info@deanallman.com for further assistance.
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