Editing

 Well, I've been home for a couple of weeks now. (sigh of relief)

I have been looking through the boxes and boxes of photos and papers that I brought home from my mom's house. Some days it is just overwhelming—everything is overwhelming on those days. And some days it's fun. 

Every single box you see in my living room has photos or papers that I brought from my mom's house to be scanned. And there's lots more, still waiting.
It's kind of exciting, actually. On a fun day.

Today is one of the fun days, so I thought I'd show you what I'm doing to edit photos.

First of all, I bought a dedicated photo scanner; it will scan photos, negatives, and slides. (It scans documents too, but I bought it specifically for photos and negatives.) The cool thing about it is that it will scan in up to 9600 dpi. For those of you who might not know, dpi is dots per inch. 

So, here's some technical stuff:

Your printer doesn't see pictures as pictures, but as dots or pixels. If you have 1 dpi, then each pixel will fill up one square inch; 20 dpi would be 20 pixels per square inch. Ideally, for printing pictures, you want at least 300 dpi. But if you scan a one-inch negative at 300 dpi, then you can only print a one-inch picture and still have it look good. If you even double its size, it will look blurry and pixelated. Like this:

Well... this is an exaggerated example I got on the internet (I don't own the Mona Lisa). Your pictures wouldn't look this bad on the computer monitor, but they would make some pretty terrible prints (although, as I said, not as bad as this sample).

Now, if I scan the photo (negative) at 2400 dpi, then when I edit it I can reduce the dpi to 300 (printing size) in my editing software. But here is the cool part: When I reduce the dpi by eight times, the one-inch negative increases by eight times. 

You can see in the top picture that this negative strip is 6.407 inches wide (outlined in pink), and was scanned at 2400 pixels per inch (dpi—in green).
In the bottom picture I changed the dpi to 300, but the width of negative strip jumped to 51.253 inches!
I can easily reduce this to a good, printable size
when I'm finished with it.

So now I can print my finished picture at the correct dpi (300), and enlarge it to a good print size. Cool, huh?

OK. The first thing I did was choose a negative to scan. I had to do some tricky stuff with my scanner because it was an unusual negative size (I won't go into detail here. You're welcome.) But what it meant is that instead of the scanner correcting the color on the negative, I had to do it myself. Here's what I scanned:

Yup. It's a strip of negatives.

The first thing I do is to invert the color:

Still not great, but better...believe it or not.

Then the beginnings of some color correction:

This is looking much better!

Since I only want to work on one picture at a time, and because the computer is really slow when it works on images this big, I'm going to copy just one of these pics to another window so I can work on it. I chose the middle picture:

So here the color looks better, but it's kind of dull. Also, all the whitish specks and lines are dust that need to be cleaned up. I did get an anti-static cloth and clean the negative (which is a little scary after a whole lifetime of being told, "Don't touch the negatives!"). This is probably the fourth time I scanned and then dusted this particular negative trying to get it "perfect". When do you say, "That's enough of that!" ?

Well. This was my stopping point. I'll have to clean the dust with the computer software. But first, a little more color-correction:

That looks pretty nice,
but now the dust really stands out!

Time to get rid of some dust particles. This takes a while, and I'm not going to go into detail—I'll just show you some before and after pics.

I zoomed in on Dad and Huston so you can see it a little better—and, of course, if you click on the pic, it should show even bigger:

before...see the dust?

and after

All of this takes a long time—about five hours for this picture (although get a little faster as I get into the swing of it.) But I won't do this with every photo and slide; there are hundreds of them! And while it can be fun, and it's definitely interesting, I'm still trying to run my household.

Anyway, that's what I've been doing in my spare time. Well, all right; it's actually the housework that takes up my spare time. ;-)

Here's the finished photo. 

Not bad, huh?

This picture was worth the cleanup time for a few reasons. First of all, we have very few pictures of Huston...well, I haven't run across any more yet. I remember at least one time when I went with Dad all the way to Salt Lake City (it seemed like such a long ride back then!) to pick up Huston so he could spend Christmas Day with us. I loved having my dad all to myself for that ride—and I was a little jealous and bored once Huston joined us. Kids!

Second, you can see what our living room used to look like in the early 70s, and I think that's kind of cool. I remember it so well: The dark wooden furniture that was barely cushioned enough to be sittable. The gold, textured carpet with such a low pile that it was really more like a heavy fabric—so prevalent back then. The pinkish chair that, for some reason, makes me think of my Grandma Johnson. The carved, wooden Indian head that, I believe, was from Brasil. The famous picture (famous in our family, at least) of the old, blind beggar that Mom had painted...and had gotten two different offers of $500 for! The wooden statue of a mother and child that Peter had given to Mom. Our old, black & white, Motorola TV. Even the three wrought-iron candle holders with the red, gold, and green glass cups. 

And, third, you can see how cute Wendy, Denise and I were...or at least how little we were. And also, that's my brand new baby doll that I got that morning (I could tell you a story about that doll—and one about the little ironing board too.)

That's probably Uncle Norman, sitting behind me on the pink chair; probably Nolan in the foreground on the right. Good stuff.

Anyway, that's what I'm working on these days. And now it's time to get back to editing pictures instead of just talking about editing them. :-)