Rephotographing Old Photos
- Thread starter terse
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The colorized version looks to be in better condition and is an artifact of the age in its own right, but I prefer the b/w version.
MotownLarry
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Isn't there there a rule or something like a fact of life that all babies are cute?I like the tinted one...
...and how cute were you???
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- Lisa Waddell
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What a cutie! I vote for the tinted photo. That style of photography definitely has a place in history.
The tinted image brought me back to when I shot with a Canon SLR, developed my film, and was dipping into hand coloring my photos. At the time it was a fairly new thing (i.e., the girl with the umbrella and everything is B&W except the umbrella or her boots type of thing.) I really loved it because it felt like painting... really it was similar to coloring in a coloring book! But I liked it. 
I'd kept my photo paints all these years until my recent move... I kept thinking I'd get back to it. Still have my Canon SLR too... can't seem to depart with it, even though I haven't picked it up in......20-ish years?? There's still film in it, yet to be shot.
I'd kept my photo paints all these years until my recent move... I kept thinking I'd get back to it. Still have my Canon SLR too... can't seem to depart with it, even though I haven't picked it up in......20-ish years?? There's still film in it, yet to be shot.
juryjone
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- Jerry Jobe
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The tint is nice, but what impresses me is the removal of the dotted texture!
juryjone
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- Jerry Jobe
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For those interested in colorizing photos, here's a tutorial using iColorama.
https://enthusiasmnoted.wordpress.c...phy-apps-colorizing-bw-images-with-icolorama/
https://enthusiasmnoted.wordpress.c...phy-apps-colorizing-bw-images-with-icolorama/
I was guessing that the tinted one was printed on a different paper. I have some photo prints from the same era that my parents printed on a kind of textured sparkly paper that's almost impossible to scan well, even with a good desktop scanner. It gives me fits.
Cool! That saves me from trying to figure out which app to use for colorizing!
juryjone
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- Jerry Jobe
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I was guessing that the tinted one was printed on a different paper. I have some photo prints from the same era that my parents printed on a kind of textured sparkly paper that's almost impossible to scan well, even with a good desktop scanner. It gives me fits.
I got the impression that the tinted version was retouched from the other. I guess I was wrong. It's very difficult to remove those paper textures.
MotownLarry can tell us for sure. If there's an app that can remove textures like that on the b/w, I want to know about it, too.
juryjone
MobiLurver
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- Jerry Jobe
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Removing color casts
Old photos can fade or get some horrible changes in color. This photo from the seventies has just such a cast. (As well as some textured paper that a PITA.)
There are multiple ways to get rid of a cast. One of them is with a simple white balance, as done here in Snapseed. It does a good job here, because the one young lady has a white shirt, and I can use the shadow to set a WB point.
If her shirt was cream or pink, however, there might have been no WB point. You can then use a technique I adapted from Photoshop, using MaxCurve.
You need to adjust the Red, Blue, and Green curves using a histogram. You will see that the Red histogram does not go all the way to the ends. I pull the ends of the curve in to the ends of the histogram, and now the histogram fills in from end to end.
Doing that with all three curves (and the blue one needed a major change) gives these results.
Old photos can fade or get some horrible changes in color. This photo from the seventies has just such a cast. (As well as some textured paper that a PITA.)
There are multiple ways to get rid of a cast. One of them is with a simple white balance, as done here in Snapseed. It does a good job here, because the one young lady has a white shirt, and I can use the shadow to set a WB point.
If her shirt was cream or pink, however, there might have been no WB point. You can then use a technique I adapted from Photoshop, using MaxCurve.
You need to adjust the Red, Blue, and Green curves using a histogram. You will see that the Red histogram does not go all the way to the ends. I pull the ends of the curve in to the ends of the histogram, and now the histogram fills in from end to end.
Doing that with all three curves (and the blue one needed a major change) gives these results.
MotownLarry
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The paper is quite different with the tinted version on a heavier stock, different quality. Who knows what determined paper choices back then.
What a transformation! Well done.
Wow, the clarity of this is superb! I really rue the bad quality of the cameras we used in the 1970s.
Very cool! Thank you, I'm sure Mike will really enjoy seeing it, too! He is in love with his bike!
MotownLarry
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Another app to photograph old pictures. This is their promo statement (a Google product):
"PhotoScan gets you great looking digital copies in seconds - it detects edges, straightens the image, rotates it to the correct orientation, and removes glare. Scanned photos can be saved in one tap to Google Photos to be organized, searchable, shared, and safely backed up at high quality—for free."
I don't know about all of it, but it did well with correcting the glass reflection. My grandfather and the first 6 of 17 children. Taken about 1900.
"PhotoScan gets you great looking digital copies in seconds - it detects edges, straightens the image, rotates it to the correct orientation, and removes glare. Scanned photos can be saved in one tap to Google Photos to be organized, searchable, shared, and safely backed up at high quality—for free."
I don't know about all of it, but it did well with correcting the glass reflection. My grandfather and the first 6 of 17 children. Taken about 1900.
I think it did a fantastic job!
...and I'm still trying to wrap my mind around "17 kids". Being a woman, and understanding what your body goes through during a pregnancy, I just can't imagine it. And since most pregnancies last 9 months... it doesn't seem like there'd be much time in between birth and the next pregnancy. And in those days the woman took care of the kids and household. Major props to your Grandmother... she must have been one strong woman.
I've been using PhotoScan, too, and I also found that it did very well at eliminating reflections from glass or glossy photos in a variety of settings. Other than that one thing, I don't see it has anything special to offer that you can't find elsewhere, but it's very handy just for that, especially if you don't have a studio-like setting where you can manipulate the lighting.
(For you all in the audience, the app eliminates glare by taking one overall snap and then directing you to move the camera to four other positions where it takes more snaps, ending up with 5 snaps in all, which it combines into one output image.)
That's a really big perk... getting rid of glare is practically impossible.
MotownLarry
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Agreed, Ted. The only reason I downloaded it was to avoid the glare or reflections.
MotownLarry
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One of my major hobbies is genealogy and many of my ancestors had as many children or near so. Many children died young. It was a different world. And I some some interesting stories.I think it did a fantastic job!
...and I'm still trying to wrap my mind around "17 kids". Being a woman, and understanding what your body goes through during a pregnancy, I just can't imagine it. And since most pregnancies last 9 months... it doesn't seem like there'd be much time in between birth and the next pregnancy. And in those days the woman took care of the kids and household. Major props to your Grandmother... she must have been one strong woman.
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I was thinking that too, that it was amazing that 17 children survived. And that your grandmother survived all those births (dying in childbirth was the main cause of death for women.)
MotownLarry
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Actually, their 3rd child died at just over 2 months. Later there was a set of twins, one died at 3 months. 15 survived to adults. Those French Canadians were of hardy stock.