“Photo” Enhancements

Getting a good picture from an aged image is crucial to developing and maintaining a good family history.  Unfortunately as you look around ManyRoads, you’ll notice countless images that ought to be fixed.  Aside from being a tad lazy, the skills required to accomplish this effort are significant and confusing.

Much like the Document Enhancement posting of several days ago. We need to find a good image processing environment.  I use the Gimp (an open source toolset that runs under Linux among other operating systems).  Many Windows users employ Adobe Photoshop, the pre-eminent tool kit (but pricey).  Numerous additional options are listed on About.com.

Because I do things by hunt and peck or explore and find method it is a bit hard for me to explain what really works and what doesn’t.  However, I can tell you that I achieve some measures of success. Below are two images that I reworked using a very limited knowledge and skill base (mine!).  I think you’ll agree that even amateurs can achieve usable results.

The point of the posting is to encourage you to press on and try enhancing your own photos.  Just keep backups of the originals.  At the best you’ll get some better photos… at the worst you’ll lose a little time.

You may notice that more time was spent on this photo than I spent on the next.

Because this photo is somewhat less important to me than the early photo, I only performed a ‘quick’ set of fixes.

By the way, my efforts on these two photos consumed about 4 hours.