Editing Old Photos

I consider myself very fortunate to have photo albums that belong to my family.  I enjoy walking through the past and sorting out how things used to be.  I find myself browsing Google Earth trying to find locations to businesses that no longer exist, searching for family information at Ancestry.com, and talking with family about their knowledge of things past.  This particular project was no different.

This project involved a fairly random photo album created by my great grandpa George.  This album is dated 1955, and has photos of Yellowstone National Park, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, and Washington DC.

Working on this project takes quite a bit of time.  There were 379 photos in the album.  I had to remove them from the original album, scan them at 600 dpi (anything higher didn't give these photos any better resolution), and then put them in a new archival photo album.  That part took only a few hours, but the rest is what took me so long to finish.  Over the next two years in my spare time, I added keyword tags and captions, changed the creation dates, and then edited them.

To tag these photos, I used Adobe Lightroom 3.  It allows me to have thousands of keywords without having to type them or remember which ones I've used previously.  One disadvantage of Adobe Photoshop Elements is that Elements bogs down if there are too many photos in your catalog or if you have too many tags.  One nice advantage to keyword tagging photos with Lightroom is that if you decide to rename the keyword tag in the future, it updates all the photos using that keyword.  I like that! (y)

I used a variety of keyword tags, and here's where you can tell I'm a geek.  I tagged photos for the people I knew in them.  They were mostly my relatives, so there were only a few people I didn't know anyway.  As well, I tagged the photos for their locations.  Not only did I use political boundaries like states and cities to define an image, but I would also tag them with locations that were visible in the photo.  Many of these places don't exist today, but that doesn't mean someone isn't searching for it somewhere on the Internet!  I tagged animals that were in the photos, and if I couldn't make a positive identification, I tagged it with something as scientifically close as possible.  If I couldn't tell what kind of goose was in the photo, I would tag it with the order for geese, ducks, and swans—Anseriformes—for example.  If these tags weren't enough, I tagged them for thematic material such as hydrothermal features (like hot springs in Yellowstone) and cars.  I'm not up on my old cars so I didn't try to identify them!  I also tagged the photos with some personally identifying information for our family's use.

On the photo illustration below, I used several tags: 1955-00-00 George & Eloise's Trip to Yellowstone, Colorado, Craig, Family Archives, George's Album 01, Lariat Motel, and United States of America.

Lightroom 3 is a little clunky when it comes to changing the date on an image, but it works.  I changed the photos' dates from their scan date and time to the actual date of the photo.  So In the photo illustration below, I changed its date from 12/26/2011 7:49:08 PM to 9/3/1955 12:00:00 AM.

The editing process is fairly extensive.

This is the original scan.

First I straighten the photo.

Next, I crop it so that the white borders don't show.

Then, I adjust the lighting.  Since I'm using Adobe Photoshop Elements 10, I auto-adjust the lighting levels, adjust the shadows and highlights, and adjust the brightness and contrast.

After that, I filter out the dust and scratches and heal the photo using the various tools in Elements.  My goal is to make these photos look as much like the original scene as possible so I try to avoid filler.

Lastly, I sharpen the image to have better defined lines.

Once I was done organizing and editing the photos, I uploaded them to my Google+ account via Picassa 3.  Are you ready to see the finished product!?  Here it is: George's Album 1955.