Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Some Lightroom magic



A while back I discussed  my work in scanning a photo album belonging to my great grandmother, Edith Fowler.  (See this post).  After scanning and annotating every photo in the album, I chose several for post-scan improvement using a wonderful program called Lightroom 5.  From time to time I will be posting "before and after" photos, showing the state of a photo as it comes from a camera or a scanner as compared to its  state after I apply various tools available in Lightroom 5.  For the inaugural presentation I give you a photo of Edith's son Ray, (my great uncle), as a school boy.  As you can see from the original scan, the photo was pasted a bit askew into the album.  The actual photo is very small and very old.  It is almost completely washed out except for Edith's blue ink annotation: "Ray home from school."  When I first saw the photo and later scanned it I did not believe there was much hope of "saving" it, even using Lightroom 5.  Well, much to my delight, I was able to produce a final print that vastly improves the original.  I'm still a bit amazed.  See what you think.


Before




After