Old Photos

 

 

What do you do with those old photos that you took on vacation if you lived most of your life before the digital age and took film photos that you had processed at the local mini-labs? Sometimes the developing was excellent, but more often than not, it was so-so and the color was slightly off, etc. There was a period of time where my husband and I used a commercial lab in California that would also develop for the general public, but the vast majority of our older photos were done at the local K-Mart or CVS pharmacy.


For those of us who have enjoyed photography for the last 50 or more years (in my case more), but we never got into our own developing, most of us have some marginal photos that were actually well composed and the lighting was good, but they still needed some help, that wasn’t available until the advent of editing software.

I use Photoshop, but for those out there that are not into shooting for sale, or for printing large images, but would like to fix some of their older family shots, or even some of their best travel photos, there are free programs you can download and even simple ones that come with your computer. I’m not up with the latest versions of these but all you have to do is do a search for “free photo editing software” and you’ll find a few.

The next step is to scan your old photos, or re-photograph them. The average person doesn’t have a scanner (mine died several years ago - I need to replace it eventually), but you can usually go to the local drug store, buy a thumb drive or a DVD and scan in old photos at a kiosk, although I’m sure the DVDs will be phased out as newer computers only have a USB port.

If you have a smart phone, you can also try photographing the photos in question with your phone. The cameras on the newer phones are actually pretty decent in good lighting, but you would have to try to have even lighting with no glare to get a good image. Then email it to yourself from your phone or connect the phone to your computer or tablet and import the images.

Then play around! Make copies first so you don’t have to re-scan or re-shoot if you mess up, but it’s nice to have something you can share. All the photographs in this blog post were “filtered” in Photoshop or a program called Topaz Impression, which can take old, scratched and not so well developed photos and turn them into something that’s at least interesting, and maybe artful. Even the Notre Dame image was just converted in the Topaz program to a sketch. The photo itself is grainy and I took it on a gray day in Paris, so the skies were “blown out” (over exposed) and the lighting and color on the image were pretty uninspired.


What you see here is the Napali Coastline on the Island of Kauai, Notre Dame de Paris, Many Glacier Lodge in Glacier National Park, and The Moulin Rouge in Paris. All of these photos I loved when I got them back from the lab, but they were still not really up to par as actual “art”, so I have filtered them and preserved the memories of those trips with something better than the originals. 

For more of my images, please visit:
https://mary-bedy.pixels.com/

 

 

 



Comments

  1. Dorothy Berry-LoundSeptember 23, 2020 at 3:24 PM

    Great advice here Mary.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mary BedySeptember 23, 2020 at 4:05 PM

      Thanks, Dorothy. I know all of us are used to using the software, but I thought maybe I could inspire someone to work on their own stuff even if they don't really normally do that.

      Delete

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