Colour management

Here we have an example of colour management gone wrong...

Believe it or not, this image was supplied for reproduction by the Australian National Library with broken colour management but with careful adjustment it was repaired (without a reference photo!).

Have a look at the standard colour swatch block, the green patch is grey, the yellow is brown, the red is orange.... All in all a disaster!

You can see that the 'after' result looks fantastic and this was one of a set of a dozen images, all mishandled at some point in their history but carefully repaired by colour management surgery combined with old fashioned tonal adjustment.

Colour management, particularly for printing is a speciality of mine, if you are in Graphic Design or Prepress and need any help with colour issues or just want some training in colour adjustment or management, drop me a line.  Online help is available.

Photo repairs

Here is a popular subject; Repairing old photo's of school days or ancestors.

In the top row, is a photo affected by salt crystals growing on the paper plus some physical damage, easily repaired, I do professional repair work such as this for only a few dollars each, ask for a quote.

The painting shown above left is a small version of a digital photo taken by someone of their painting which had since been sold, they regretted not having a good reproduction of the photo but with careful restoration an accurate version was restored.

If you have old newspaper photos, the halftone screens are quite coarse and detrimental to the appearance of the photo, the example above has been treated to remove the screen dots. See larger example below.

If you are writing a family history and want to include old screened photos, I can batch process them quite efficiently and when this is done, you can reproduce the new versions in a printed document without the dreaded moire pattern!   What you can see in the example above is not actually a moire, but the moire is what happens when you screen a photo twice which is what will happen if you offset print a photo like the example.

Send me your old photo scans for restoration or descreening.

Car Modifications

I am a car lover and a friend asked me what a 2 door coupe version of a 1960's Humber Sceptre would look  like, so here it is...

Here is my son's 1978 Cortina with new Photoshop wheels, blower and body mods... If you are reading this and want a free preview of your proposed body mods, just ask. If I choose your project as my Photoshop sample car, I will do free mod's to your taste including colour change, wheels, tint, lowering, accessories and so on.  You will need to supply a good pic and info on mods and links to desired wheels etc.  Then you will agree to let me put your photoshopped car on this site as a sample.

This is my 1965 Cortina project example, started with a light green standard car and Photoshopped the wheels, paint, spats and lowering to visualise a possible project.


Send me yours to do!!!

Colourising Black and White Photos is fun!

I love the idea of colourising old photo's, we look at our old family photo's and wonder what those people were really like.

My technique uses overlays and blending methods to colourise the old photo. Not every photo can be done, but faces are usually pretty straightforward. I have not tried on many ethnic skin types yet but looking forward to it.

If you are reading this and want to have a pic colourised for free, just drop me a msg and I will do a few freebies (as long as you let me show them on my site as examples). First in, best dressed, I will need a good scan of the pic and a colour photo of a recent relative as reference for skin-tone, and if you know anything about the person such as their hair and eye colour that will help too. Clothing can be done but is harder.

The example above is my great-grandfather and my great uncle.  Suddenly I feel like I have actually met them.

Controlling lightning!

Making lightning is straightforward enough in Photoshop, but did you ever try to get it to work in with your other elements?  Tricky huh!

Well I nailed that sucker with a punch to the funky funny bone.

More to come, including tutorial if I can translate it from Vogon into English...