From: "Barb Himes"
<behimes gmail.com>
Subject: 1926 Picnic Photo
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:54:50 -040
Hi Mark,
Here's the
whole photograph, final version (for now, anyway). I'll send you the
original (unretouched) pieces in subsequent e-mails.
As I told Susan
earlier today, now that I look at it closely, I wish I had done more
nit-picky work on it--if I'd known that people would be studying it up
close, I probably would have, and maybe still will. I thought I was
doing the restoration so that Susan and her relatives could make framed
8" x 36" photographs to hang on their walls. But had I known there were
so many people out there with an up-close interest in the photo, I
would have taken more time on each face and clothing details.
Some background
info about how I did it... Sorry, this will be a long description, but
looking back on it I learned so much, and I love being able to tell
someone the whole process! (Susan's eyes glaze over when I tell her.
Even if it's over the phone, I can feel her eyes glaze. Ha.) Anyway, I
will start my story by admitting that the two-year time span was
9/10ths my procrastination, and 1/10 re-doing it three separate times.
About two years
ago, it all began when Susan showed me the photo one day and I said I
thought I could retouch it in PhotoShop, figuring the whole thing would
take maybe five hours max. She got a scan made at a local, good-quality
photo store, and they scanned it in several pieces.
At that time, I
didn't know how to merge two separate pieces together but I thought I
could teach myself. I did it the wrong way, using a 19-pixel Photoshop
brush, plus I had cropped one of the scanned pieces ever so slightly,
changing the size of the image ever so slightly, so of course things
didn't match up when I went to merge them. That part probably took me
between 25 and 50 hours, with numerous false starts, but finally I got
all the pieces merged together.
I didn't know
that Photoshop has a 300-pixel brush available to use, allowing one to
select larger pieces to merge. Using the 19-pixel brush felt a bit like
washing an elephant with spit and a sponge the size of a dime. I also
learned late in the game that if you make the background red instead of
gray by default, you can tell where you've missed because it remains
bright red until you cover the area. (Tells you where you haven't been
yet.) I can explain that in more detail if you're ever going to merge
two photos together. Makes a huge difference--essential to know.
Anyway, after
the merge I worked on the individual faces and clothing and sky and
grass, erasing dots and scratches and cracks, and rebuilding missing
ears or eyes (by clone-stamping pixels from the left eye/ear to the
missing right eye/ear, for example). I love that kind of nit-picky
work, so I could do many hours at a stretch, quite happily. I generally
used a 9- or 13-pixel clone stamp to do this fine work, with the photo
zoom set at about 300%, so that the face I was working on filled most
of my computer screen. The nit-picky part took maybe 100 hours or so.
But there were
problems with glare spots that obliterated whole faces, turning them
into white spots. The quality of the overall photo reproduction was
fine, just those darned white spots. And as I continued to work, it
eventually occurred to me that glare spots maybe could be avoided
somehow, but I'd already put in all that time. Definite low point--I
got very discouraged. This was early September last year, right before
Susan's reunion, and it was awful to have worked so hard and come up
short. I felt in my gut that I should really start over with a new
scan, but I couldn't face it, couldn't face doing it all over again.
And I knew I wouldn't have time to do a full re-do before the reunion,
so I just gave up. Susan remained my friend.
We talked with
the photo store folks about the glare and they said they couldn't avoid
it, couldn't give us a cleaner copy with their equipment. So last fall
we had it re-scanned at a different, higher-end photo shop. They had a
large scanner and could do the whole thing in one scan, which was
wonderful, because it meant I wouldn't have to merge the photo together
again. Yay! I had high expectations for this version. I tackled it this
summer and got most of the tiny pixel (nit-picky) restoration done
again. This time around, though, the restoration seemed easier, like I
didn't have as many dots and scratches to fix, which was odd, but hey,
I wasn't complaining!
Anyway, there
were some very tiny areas of glare with this scan also, so I borrowed
the original photo from Susan and decided to scan the affected areas on
my dad's 10-year-old HP scanner that he got as a freebie when he bought
his computer. I had not considered using this scanner from the get-go,
because it was not a high-end scanner, and it only had a 9" x 12"
glass. But I figured for half-a-dozen faces, it would be okay,
resulting in an unnoticeable correction. So I scanned a small piece,
intending to "clone stamp" from one scan to the other, placing the
corrected image over the glare spot. Kind of a cut-and-paste. Makes
sense, right? Except that what I found, when I looked at what I had
just scanned using the 10-year-old scanner, was that my scan was much
clearer than the scanned version I'd been working on. Oh, no. In fact
it was a huge difference, the kind of difference that made me realize I
was looking at starting all over again. (Later I figured out that the
reason it was easier to restore the second scan was that it was a
highly pixelated version, with many of the wonderful details
missing--less to see, less to fix.) I'm guessing that at the high-end
photo shop, in using a large scanner with an obviously oversized photo,
and in doing it all in one scan, they probably used a very low dpi
resolution. Why else would we have ended up with a highly pixelated
version of the photograph?
What to do,
what to do. At this point I abandoned scan #2. Even though I knew I was
looking at starting from scratch again, it was a teensy bit exciting
because at least now I knew that I could get a tight picture quality
and eliminate all glare, that I could control all the variables, if I
was just willing to scan Susan's photo in pieces, knit it together, and
do the scratch/spot/eye/nose/sky/grass fixes one more time. (I was.)
My dad's
scanner has different settings but the highest setting, 1200 dpi, took
10+ minutes to scan the first piece (which was okay), but it actually
made the jpeg too large to manipulate on my computer. This first piece,
which I called Piece AA, was 8" high x 3.5" wide, a real snippet of the
whole photo, and it was something like 28,000 KB, as I recall--for just
three-and-a-half inches of the photo! So I felt I had no choice but to
scan at 600 dpi--not as great a level of resolution, but the results
(which you've seen) were better than the first two professional scans,
so I was contented if not deliriously happy.
I took the
three pieces of the original photograph and scanned them in six parts,
(remember my scanner has a limited glass size), and these are Pieces AA
BB CC DD EE and FF. Piece AA is one photo fragment, measuring 3.5"
wide. Pieces BB and CC are one photo fragment, measuring 16" wide,
which was actually just a smidge too wide to scan as two pieces, so I
had to add a middle scan, labeling it Piece BC. The third photo
fragment is the largest, measuring 20" wide, requiring three scans, DD,
EE, and FF.
I decided to
merge the seven pieces before trying to do the actual photo
restoration. For one thing, if I couldn't merge them for some reason, I
didn't want to put all that work into the restoration part again. Now
that I know I can do it all, I would probably reverse the order: fix
faces/clothing first, and merge last, because the photo once merged
became very unwieldy to work on.
The seven-piece
merge itself went without a hitch this time. I had learned a tremendous
amount and made no errors. But, when I started the scratch/spot/face
fixing, I found when I went to save the file, it wouldn't allow me to
save it at high resolution, saying I didn't have sufficient RAM.
What??? The whole thing was only 20,000 KB. Wouldn't let me save it. So
I was forced to save it each time on medium resolution, which almost
killed me as you can imagine. I even went out and bought 1 GB
of RAM. Hubby installed it. Still said I didn't have enough RAM for a
high-resolution save. So as a result, I'd work on it for 6-8 hours at a
stretch without saving it, fearing that each save was degrading the
resolution. That was the only thing that drove me crazy on this third
restoration attempt. Working for 8 hours at a time without a save was
risky, but I never lost my work, or you might have heard me wailing all
the way out in California! The restoration on this final go-around
probably took 8 or 9 eight-hour sessions.
Anyway, I know
this is a long-winded explanation but now that you know all of it, you
can see why it's hard to say what I did in one paragraph. Didn't do
anything right the first time. Learned a lot along the way. So if you
want to put my name down as having done the photo restoration, that'd
be lovely. You can just put my name (Barbara Eason Himes) and say I'm a
Morelli family friend. I'd be happy to give details to anyone who's
interested, so you can include my e-mail address or not, as you wish. I
just don't know how to capture what I did in a blurb, especially since
most of it was trial-and-error. I guess I'm not a blurb kind of gal.
So. Maybe down
the road I'll attempt one more restoration, now that I know what I'm
doing, and I can really focus on the details. I let hands and other
relatively minor body parts go when the photo damage was too great in
some places. I would have worked harder on individual faces except
that, as you now know, I took the long road to get where we are now. So
that's my story. I'm so happy that the scan and restoration I did give
you many details you didn't have before. That is wonderful to know that
people will be identified because of my efforts. Means a lot to
me.
I'll send the
original scan pieces under separate e-mails. I wouldn't even mind
trying to scan them again at the highest resolution, but I won't be
able to manipulate them.
You sound
wonderful in your e-mails and I'll tell you that Susan is a terrific
friend, a truly wonderful person. I'm so glad to know her joy at
finding others who love this amazing photograph and are connected to it
like she is.
Good night for
now,
Barb |
From: Glenn Pierce <grp852
For as long as I can keep this file
on-line, here is the 11MB
super high resolution version
of the photo. It is a JPG format file. Any photography shop
should be able to make a very nice large print from this file. The
original photo was 36" by 8".
