Category Archives: Uncategorized

Restoring Color on Faded Photos

Greetings to you all.

I hope spring has sprung where you are, and you are out and about taking great pictures of spring flowers and life!

I have been home re-cooping from knee surgery, so I haven’t been able to get out as much as I wanted to enjoy the wonderful weather in the high desert of Southern California.

While I have been home and realize there is nothing on day time television, I broke out some old photos and decided to start scanning.  One of the years I scanned was 1977.  Time and not been good to these photos. Stuck in photo albums with plastic over the page, to “protect” them, kind of faded them. And some had tears, scratches and who knows what on them.

While you can restore a photograph to near perfection with lots of tips and tricks, I have a few tips and tricks that can help you with the basic color restoration.  I was lucky enough to take an online photo restoration class.  I love restoration, but it sure can be time consuming.

In these photos the adjustments were all the same.

 

Create a Levels Adjustment layer

Once the Levels Adjustment box is open; choose the drop down arrow where it says RGB.

Select Red

Once you have this open, move the slider to the left just to the beginning of where the red begins to show on your photo.

Once you have finished the red,  repeat the steps with the Green and the Blue.  Once you do the blue, most of the colors will be back to almost original.

After playing with this for awhile, it will become easier than you thought to bring colors back to some of the old photos you thought you wouldn’t be able to save.

When the color has been corrected, you can then play with the clone tool, spot healing brush and the patch tool (under the healing brush tab).  To fix any tears and scratches or other colors.

I didn’t spend hours on these two photos, but I was able to accomplish what I wanted.  A brighter photo with some basic restoration applied.

Hope you may have learned a little something with this tip.  I am sure there are a zillion ways to do the same thing I just mentioned.  Do what you are comfortable with!!!

Basic color restoration before and after 01

 

 

levels adj for people too
Until Next Time

Happy Shooting

TracyLynn

Fun with Apps

Hello world…

Yes I’m so glad I started this blog for my photos and then failed miserably at uploading anything to it.  That’s me… Put it off another day… lol

So I have an addiction, of the worst kind. Seems I just love photography apps for my iPhone.  It really started a while back, but I was on Instagram and one of my friends had posted a really cool picture. So I just had to know what the app was… Yikes.. That lead to about 3 apps later.  The app was called distressed fx.   Which led to the tangled fx which lead to vintage fx.  And now you see, it’s bad.  I have a lot of plug-ins for photoshop and lightroom and I am enjoying learning texture overlays and all that fun stuff but I fell in love with the vintage fx.  So I came home today and wanted to see if the Apple App store had it available for the computer.  Ya, okay.. so 25.00 later,  I have want I want.  And now I’m having fun bringing new/old life to existing pictures.IMG_4632

I posted this picture on Facebook, the birds were part of the app on my phone.  So this is the one that people were commenting on, that drove me to find it for my computer.  I really just wanted to capture the tree, but then my creative side took over.  Oops!

So, with that said, here are a few of the photos I’ve had fun editing and playing with today. As my husband slaves away doing tile work in the bathroom.  Oh I did wash my car today!!! I am no longer a bad car mom!  It’s not just for still life and flower pictures,  I did a couple landscapes as well. I really need to photograph some people, so I can see how it works with real life as well.

5x7 rose vintage 02 copy

Daisy 01 vintage fx

tulips vintage fx 01

Finding Bigfoot 01

Distressed River 02

Oregon bridge and river

Worn Tetons 01

I hope you’ve enjoyed my little photographic adventure.  www.jixipix.com is the site that I got the programs from for my computer!!!

Have a wonderful week

Tracy Lynn

The First of Many

I have been doing a lot of reading about marketing “myself” as a photographer, and everything falls back on getting a blog.  I have my personal blog, so I decided what the heck. I will start one for my photography.  Once I get it up and running I will have previews of my work, old and new.  This is something that means the world to me and I would love to be able to do it on a more regular basis, (photography).  My go-to  for photography is mainly landscape photography.  Being that I live in the desert, it can get quite frustrating when it comes to taking landscape photos.  I have started learning and experimenting with still life photography and I find that I really enjoy this as well.  Once we get out of Southern California and move back to Montana, I will be on a mission to do even more landscape photography. I have shot a few weddings, mainly for family and close friends.  I am a candid photographer. While you must have your posed wedding pictures, I find it much more satisfying to capture people in their real element. You know, kind of like sneaking around and getting them being who they really are.  Cute, Dorky, Funny, and Loving.  I hope you’ll follow me on my photographic journey.  Let the games begin!!!

Thank you all in advance!

tracylynn