This distinctive couple find there way to Tom Cronise and get this extrordinary portrait. Cronise was noted for his sense of humor and ability to capture real images of his clients. In general, 99% of portraits are "posed", Cronise's portraits look contemporary, he had the ability to make people loosen up and be themselves. Click to enlarge image and we value any comments or impressions you have.
Photos and their film negatives are our most treasured family artifacts. Knowing and using some simple techniques may save your images for several generations. If you are the steward of your family’s image past, be responsible and take these precautionary steps.
1. Store negatives in modern archival papers or plastic. The old paper or plastic sleeves can be very damaging due to chemicals and impurities. Search online for “archival supplies”.
2. Temperature, humidity and light exposure are your worst enemies. Constant changes in heat and humidity may cause the silver particles in film and photos to tarnish. In color photos and negatives the color will fade or alter. Sleeve and box!
3. Safe storage is a room of relatively stable temperature and humidity. Never store precious photos or negatives in the basement, attic or garage.
4. Your photographs and negatives box should be stored about a foot or two above the floor for two reasons; one, high enough above an interior flood and two, low enough to avoid smoke and fire danger. In a fire the difference between the floor and the ceiling can be several hundred degrees.
5. After containing negatives and photographs in mylar sleeves, write with an archival pen any descriptions you may care to include. Use cotton gloves, besides they’re cute and make you look important.
6. If you scan, scan once! Create a master copy and in any future need use the master copy. Backup. Distribute. Share. Disseminate.
7. To clean, use a soft brush. If this doesn’t work, stop. Find a photographic materials conservative and spend money. One improper swipe and there goes the only image of great granny.
Reproducing an old photograph by scanning will allow you to edit the image in a photo software program. By making some simple adjustments, great detail and clarity can be brought back to the image.
1. Clean the glass of the scanner, smudges and lint can really do a number on the quality of the scan. Line up the photograph so it won’t come out tilted. Scan one image at a time, like a camera the scanner will average the exposure, if one image is dark and the other is light the scanner average will degrade both trying to find a middle.
2. Scan the image in color at 300-600 dpi and save as a .tif file. Color will enable you to do more corrective work in the editor. A 300 dpi or 600 dpi saved as a .tif will be a large image (2-4mb). The tradeoff for such a large size is that you can blow the image up to see incredible detail. Also, .tif files are like raw files, the image compression of .jpg will corrupt and degrade the initial scan.
3. Prescan or Preview. This step allows you to select just the image and by using the cropping tool in the scanner you will avoid having a humongous file size of the picture of the whole scanner bed. You can gang the photos on the bed and go back to the Preview and crop the next cropped selected image. This will save time when doing a large quantity of images.
4. Place projects I their own folders. After scanning an image, put this raw .tif in its folder
with the others of the same category. Let’s say these are scans of the Smith Family, so make a folder smithfamscan and create a sub folder to this named smithfamedits. From the scanner the raw tif go into smithfamscan and after you photoedit the images they are placed into smithfamedits folder. The reason we do this is to save the original scans just as they came from the scanner. The edited images must have their file name renamed or they will replace the original scan. So never save a photo edited image under the same name as its scanned image name.
5. Photo editors can be free and simple and really do nothing useful, or be moderate in price and do enough for our purposes or be expensive and hard to learn. If you do enough of this you will want “hard and expensive”, but in reality the best value for work performed would be a photo editor like Photoshop Elements . This is not the expensive and hard to learn Adobe Photoshop CS2, it is its little brother. Copies of this program abound and are given for free in computer start up packages or with scanners and camera packages. If you don’t already have it, someone you know does. Photoshop Elements will do all you need for our purposes.
6. The two most critical transformations using Photoshop Elements are “Levels” and “Brightness/Contrast”. By using these you can freshen generations of darkening and fading. “Levels” will let you adjust the lights, darks and midtones and can make a dingy tintype into a crisp balanced black and white. “Brightness/Contrast” will do as it says, lighten and darken and image or make it have more contrast. When adjusting these features, remember to use less than more, don’t get carried away. You don’t want to “posterize” your images, just bring back the good. One other change you may consider is to “Sharpen” the image, this can take the mushy to a more defined state.
7. When saving the edited image rename it and put it into your smithfamedits subfolder. Don’t let this be the only place either. Make CD copies, put it on a flash drive stick, email copies to interested family, in other words, widely distribute your work. To often a hard drive crashes or gets an incurable virus, by backing up and widely distributing not only you but the entire family/group perpetuates the image and its history.
8. Educate yourself. Old photographs can be dated to a period in time of one to two years. Given the style of clothing, type of photograph, background, and many other clues any picture can be precisely dated. Are these my grandparents or great grand parents? Dressed for the Photographer is an excellent book to help determining the age by the dress and clothing. Online there are several sites that may pick critical elements of a photograph and decipher the date it was taken. Look up in Google, “dating old photographs” and other key words for online references.
This distinctive couple find there way to Tom Cronise and get this extrordinary portrait. Cronise was noted for his sense of humor and ability to capture real images of his clients. In general, 99% of portraits are "posed", Cronise's portraits look contemporary, he had the ability to make people loosen up and be themselves. Click to enlarge image and we value any