Bomber Before and After

Click to embiggen!

In 1984, I attended an airshow at Namao. As usual, I snapped photos with my Kodak, which I am now dutifully scanning into my hard drive for posterity. This is a time-consuming process. Not only must I scan every negative, I must also do my best to restore the images.

On the left you can see an image as scanned, complete with the edges of the negative, dust and scratches, faded colour...it's seen better days. On the right is my attempt at restoration, cropped, colour-corrected, with dust and scratches repaired. Thanks to Jeff Shyluk I've learned that it's not enough to simply choose "auto tone" and "auto colour" and hope for the best; to achieve this result I played with the histogram, with curves, with the hue/saturation tool...but mostly I fooled around until it looked right. Sharp-eyed sleuths will not that I attempted to remove a bit of the reflected sunlight from the airplane near the cockpit, and that I had to repair the letters in "FORCE" to do so. This probably steps over the line from restoration to alteration.

I clearly have a lot to learn about Photoshop, but every one of these little projects reveals something new.