Like many of you, I started shooting film years ago, and only recently made the transition to shooting digital. For a while, I used the local drugstore's 1-hr photo processing, then switched to Ritz. About four years ago, I bought a little hp PhotoScanner. For all intents and purposes, it did a good job, creating jpegs from my 4x6s. Since they looked like my prints, and I thought I was getting pretty prints, I didn't do anything with the images except archive them.
After a while, I got tired of scanning, and started getting the CDs burned at the time of processing. Still, I never really did anything else to any of these images, except for printing 8x10s of select images.
Today, I was archiving some stuff and ran across some of these old files. In a way, it was very strange for these to turn up, as they were taken in New York City just over 4 years ago, and we're getting ready to make a trip to the city. As I looked at them, I wondered how I would treat them, if I had shot them digitally.
The original scan..........after Photoshop
 
My post processing consisted of first cloning a hair the scanner had picked up, then cropping. For the desaturization, I used a technique suggested by Neil Shapiro. First, I created two duplicate layers. The top layer's blending was set to saturization, and on this layer, I adjusted the image's saturization. On the next layer, I adjusted the image's hue.
At this point, I was somewhat satisfied with the tonality, but I still wasn't enjoying how badly the haze of the summer evening was washing out Hoboken. Using a number of selection tools, I selected the background, and created a new layer via copy. After I set this layer to multiply, I was happy. Next up, I sized it and added a border, and now feel I have an image that deserves more than being archived or stuck in a shoebox. Now, I just wish I had time to go back through all my shoeboxes...
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Message edited by author 2005-01-27 23:37:30. |
