FIX YOUR PHOTOS THE QUICK AND EASY WAY

Now that you’ve taken care of scanning your photographs, it’s time to think about how to bring faded — even damaged — photos back to life.  You are going to do this in three stages.

• First, you will open the scanned picture using an image editing program.
• Second, you will fix the picture.
• Third, you will save the edited picture as a new file.

Sounds easy doesn’t it? So let’s get going!

At this point, you’ll need to decide on the image editing software that you want to use. The ‘gold standard’ is Photoshop. But it’s complicated to learn and expensive. As it turns out, we can do what we need to do much more easily and less expensively. I often use Picnik, a free Internet based editing package whose mantra is “photo editing the easy way, online in your browser.” There are also other choices.

Most digital cameras come bundled with their own image editors. If you have an Apple, you can use iPhoto which is built in. It you have a PC running Windows or Vista, you can use (or upgrade to) Windows Live Photo Gallery.

My husband likes to use Picasa.  In contrast to Picnik, you have to download the software from Google. Once you’ve done this, though, Picasa helps you organize, edit, and share your photos. It’s free, and easy to use.

GIMP is more powerful and more complicated than the tools discussed above. I haven’t used it, but there is information at www.gimp.org.

Paint.NET is also available for free download. I haven’t used it either, but I hear that it falls somewhere in between Picasa/Picnik and GIMP. Let me know how you like it, if any of you choose to try it.

Okay. Now that you’ve selected the image editing program that suits you best, let’s fix our photos.

You’re going to want to 1) adjust the color; and 2) increase the contrast. The controls to make these adjustments vary with the editing programs. Once you master the controls, you can fix your photo in a snap. If you need help with your editing program, take a look on You Tube. They have a variety of “how to” videos for you to peruse.

So far as color is concerned, if you’re working with prints of your images, you’re most likely going to want to increase the percentage of blues and greens. These colors fade first, leaving behind that yukky red tint that most of us are familiar with. After you do this, the contrast comes into play.  You’ll want to adjust this to bring back the ‘blacks’ so that your image doesn’t look washed out.

Do you want to do more?

You might want to try some cropping, or increase the saturation and sharpness to make your picture more vivid. Or you might want to fix a scratch or convert an old color print to black and white. On the other hand, you might want to colorize an old ‘black and white.’  All of these things are possible with the appropriate software and a bit of time and effort.

When you finish playing around, make sure that you save your edited photo as a new file.  After you do this, YOU’RE DONE!

Posted by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe.

Photograph by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe.