The thread on flatbed scanners, in the Entry Digital Photography forum, set me to thinking of the old black-and-white family snapshots I have scanned into my hard drive, beginning early in 2003.
I put that idea together with the skills I've learned so far to use in LightZone, and decided to see what I could do with the Channel Mixer and the Noise Reduction tools there to improve a 1926 snapshot of my mother.
Here's the original:
And here is my effort to improve it:
The steps I took in LightZone were as follows:
1) Checked the white balance. It looked about as good as possible to me in the original, and I thought it did not need adjusting.
2) Reduced the noise. This brought out some of the ground detail and some of the detail in my mother's face.
3) Used the Channel Mixer tool to darken the photo slightly.
4) Reduced the noise a bit more.
5) Cropped the photo to take away some of the high, white sky. Cropped the farm implement on the far right to have more pleasing dimensions, to my eye, for the image.
6) After the crop, I realized that you could still not make out--at least not very well--the windmill, on the far left.
7) Selected the Channel Mixer tool; selected the Regions spline tool, which will draw a region defined by straight lines.
8) Drew a rectangular region around the windmill. Darkened this region slightly with the Channel Mixer.
9) Since I'm not very good with feathering yet, I simply made sure not to darken the windmill area more than just barely enough to make it recognizable as a windmill.
10) Then I saved and exported the image.
If someone interested in black-and-white photography could make even more difference in this photo--perhaps using a different image editor from the one I use--I would be very interested to see what more can be done with it.
Mary
I put that idea together with the skills I've learned so far to use in LightZone, and decided to see what I could do with the Channel Mixer and the Noise Reduction tools there to improve a 1926 snapshot of my mother.
Here's the original:
And here is my effort to improve it:
The steps I took in LightZone were as follows:
1) Checked the white balance. It looked about as good as possible to me in the original, and I thought it did not need adjusting.
2) Reduced the noise. This brought out some of the ground detail and some of the detail in my mother's face.
3) Used the Channel Mixer tool to darken the photo slightly.
4) Reduced the noise a bit more.
5) Cropped the photo to take away some of the high, white sky. Cropped the farm implement on the far right to have more pleasing dimensions, to my eye, for the image.
6) After the crop, I realized that you could still not make out--at least not very well--the windmill, on the far left.
7) Selected the Channel Mixer tool; selected the Regions spline tool, which will draw a region defined by straight lines.
8) Drew a rectangular region around the windmill. Darkened this region slightly with the Channel Mixer.
9) Since I'm not very good with feathering yet, I simply made sure not to darken the windmill area more than just barely enough to make it recognizable as a windmill.
10) Then I saved and exported the image.
If someone interested in black-and-white photography could make even more difference in this photo--perhaps using a different image editor from the one I use--I would be very interested to see what more can be done with it.
Mary
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I don't know if it would ever have come out this good without being third generation. Prints very nice at 12 x 18.