Image Work

The opening pages of Eisman's book clearly inform the aspirant that the one significant resource required to professionally prepare images for the web is TIME.

Working with Adobe Photoshop is a black hole bending time and sucking it into the universal abyss.

Coloring

Layers are the key to coloring and not losing your sanity. First, the iron rule in graphics work is to protect the original. Make your copy of the background layer and then "hide" the original at the bottom of the list and disable the visibility. Then, take the new "image" and adjust the layers to gain maximum detail and clarity out of the shadows of this particular photograph.

Taking a black and white World War II-era photograph of General Curtis LeMay, courtesy of the United States Air Force and transforming it into a hand-colored portrait took about five hours and a lot of experimentation. The most challenging and most detailed portion of General LeMay was his military awards. The "ribbon-rack" is a source of pain for all members of the military. It seems that Lieutenant General LeMay was no exception. In comparing a later, color photograph of General LeMay with the earlier black and white one to determine ribbon detail, I discovered that the earlier one reflected ribbons out of order and improperly worn.

Regardless, to acheive the desired effects, I created layers of the significant zones and extensively used the lasso tools to ensure I was working on detailed areas. Each Layer represented items like the ribbons, rank and other silver-colored acoutrements, hat, uniform, face, hands, etc.

From the more detailed layers, add the appropriate colors and then adjust the opacity of each to provide the desired coloring effect.

On detailed areas such as a human face, I discovered that more than one layer and multiple opacity settings can be useful in providing some color depth and, if done properly, can allow the texture of the original photograph to come through.

Restoration

For the restoration portion of this assignment I scanned a family photograph of my great-grandmother sitting with my father, my aunt, and an uncle taken in the early 1950s. The original was significantly damaged, spotted, and blurred. The color contrast was terrible as it was hard to even make out the two cats she was holding in her hands.

I scanned the image at 600 dpi, established a background copy and adjusted the layers to bring out the background. From there I induced a Gaussian blur and followed with a sharpening. The real work came with the dodge, burn, brush, and stamp tools. The biggest challenge was removing the damage to the photograph which I did in zones. I would create a rectangular selection starting at the bottom and working my way to the top, I scanned left to right in small sections at a time. As I made corrections, I zoomed out and returned to the work. More than once, the zooming out revealed substantial flaws in my work.

Once the damage was repaired, I worked to highlight the lines of the cats, articles of clothing, fingers, arms, and eyes.

When complete, I trimmed the edges slightly, and changed the image to 72 dpi for saving as a web-enabled JPEG.

Engravings

Changing the background of an engraving was not that difficult when compared to hand-coloring a complex portrait. Using Dr. Petrik's guide, I was able to modify the process and adapt it to my particular engraving of the Boston Tea Party. The original had a soft gray/white back. I created a matte layer matching a color found in one of the boats in the harbor, blending a core color to the engraving's surroundings.

 

Cropping

This was a simple proccess to use the crop tool to adjust the image to contain, or focus on, the portion of the existing image. Once applied, changing the resolution to 72 DPI makes the image more useful to the web.

To change the resolution in Adobe Photoshop CS3, select the image, open
Image -> Image Size -> in that dialog box, make the desired adjustments and hit "OK."

Vingette

The vingette is a relatively simple, artistic treatment of an image. I chose the portrait of President John F. Kennedy from the White House Historical Association.

First, you have to choose the area that you want to retain in your finished product by selecting it with the elliptical marquee tool. Then in the Select menu choose Inverse to select all areas outside of the objective. From the Select menu choose the Modify -> Feather option to provide a "padding" for the Clear action which deletes the areas not in the objective image. I chose a transparent background and set the image up as an 8-bit, RGB image that would save as a .GIF to facilitate the transparent layer enabling the image to blend into this page.