Goleta DeskTop Publishing User Group
Meeting Information

August 1 -- The Digital Darkroom: Solutions for Problem Images
presented by Hersch Nitikman & Dana Trout

We've looked at how to deal with issues like red-eye, color correction, pulling out shadow detail, and resizing images. But what about some of the other problems that come up from time to time? Tonight we will show some solutions to the following problems:
 • Creating a good image from a torn or otherwise damaged print
 • Making an acceptable image from a photo that has multiple colored
   light sources
 • Colorizing a black & white picture (great for family heirlooms or
   Made-it-Myself cards)
 • Making a decent print from a photo with a backlit subject.

Dana's parents have a torn and wrinkled print of them and their car on their wedding day. Reprinting the repaired image for their 60th wedding anniversary was a big hit.

Hersch has a picture taken over 70 years ago of his little brother on their lawn. It is a black and white image of course. For his brother's birthday card, he colorized the picture, making the grass green, his hair blond, and his skin a decent Caucasian color. It was not a work of art, but again, it worked at postage stamp size on a 4-fold greeting card, and was much more special than a store-bought card.

Dana's father-in-law had taken pictures of birthday parties when the offspring were still very young. Lighting was often poor and harsh. One picture was especially badly lit, with the subject standing in front of a window which made for a very bright backlight. Unfortunately the cake and presents, as well as the birthday girl's face, was in shadow. However, the picture has great sentimental value if a decent print could be made -- and after all these years it can!

Hersch has a more recent outdoor color photo of his wife, which had a nice expression, but a busy background, color contamination from the blue sky and green foliage gave her face most unrealistic coloration, not readily corrected with usual techniques. By converting the image to black& white (grayscale) and then colorizing the image with a decent flesh tone and masking out the busy background, a rather nice portrait resulted. It would have taken Great Skills by a master printer to do anything like that in a traditional chemical darkroom.

With the power of current computers, image-manipulation programs, and inexpensive printers which produce near photo-quality prints, one can now, with modest skills, make use of the family photo albums to produce meaningful greeting cards, calendars, and framable prints. Or those old pictures can become family photo albums distributed on CD or the web, giving every family member easy access that never was possible with the print-based photo album.

Come with your ideas and questions!

Please send email to gdtpug@troutcom.com with suggestions for topics you are interested in seeing covered. Or even better, volunteer to give a presentation!

The Goleta DeskTop Publishing Users Group is a SIG (Special Interest Group) of the Santa Barbara PC Users Group. We are not platform specific: some members have PCs, some have Macs, some have both. Linux and other systems are sprinkled in as well for good measure. We focus on the issues of publishing in all forms, be it on paper, web, CD-ROM, or some other medium.