Edit Digital Photos—continued
Time
and the environment often do bad things to family photos. There’s a lot you can
do to improve them.
Remove scratches, tears and dust
Requires
one of the more robust photo editing programs for detailed repair work of this
kind.Use a clone, rubber stamp, or heal tool.
Before repair After repair
Zoom in on the damaged area and
work on small areas at a time. Use a soft brush. Select a part of the image
that matches your damaged area and “paint” that pattern onto the damage. If it
doesn’t look right, undo and try again.
To
remove the inevitable dust, use the eyedropper to sample color from the
surrounding area of the dust spot. Zoom in so you can see individual pixels.
Use the airbrush tool to cover the dust spot. Hopefully, you eliminated most of
the dust before you scanned. Otherwise this can be a long and tedious job.
Adjust contrast
Increasing
photo contrast makes them look crisper. More complex photo editing programs
allow greater control with levels and curves. Both adjust for white, black and
color. Levels is used primarily to adjust for light and dark; curves for color.
Experiment with these tools until you are happy with the result. Small
adjustments.
What to do when the color’s gone bad
Color
balance is easily affected by such things as glue, acidic paper, polyvinyl
plastic, sun, and a host of other things. Most photo editing programs have an
auto color tool. Try it first. If you don’t like the result, undo and adjust
manually (tools: color balance, hue and saturation, levels, curves). Use skin
tones to adjust color.
Before color correction After color correction
The
curves tool is a good way to fix color. Set the channel to the color that
dominates your photo. For example, a photo that has turned red. Set the channel
to red. Then bend the curve to reduce the red.
Sharpen
All
of the moving and changing you do in the editing program adds a slight blur to
the image. Sharpen this up with the unsharp mask tool if you have it. If not,
select sharpen. Don’t overdo this effect.
Burn high resolution TIFF images to a CD
These
copies of your photos will be print ready. Put in a different folder than
unedited TIFF photos (saved as photo base during scanning process)
Copies for sharing or the web
Save
copies in JPEG format for sharing and for your family history website. Go to File>save
as and select JPEG. Choose high quality. Images for the web, go to File>save
for the web.
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