Tip of the week: Digitalize old family photos to save, repair and distribute for everybody in the family. This morning I had an opportunity to work on some old family photos from my wife's family. The photos were of her grandfather from when he was a young man. He has since passed away and the old photographs of him are extra special to everyone in the family. The original film for the photos has either been lost or destroyed over the years. Now all that remains are the prints that are passed down throughout the family. Many parents and grandparents have boxes full of old photographs of loved ones that are only saved by the one remaining print. Digitalizing old prints is a great way to copy and save some of these old family memories. Once they are digital, they can be repaired and altered to create a bigger and better version of the original print.

For this print, I decided to have a little bit of fun and to create a color version to share among the family. Coloring black and white photographs is not something that is new. The process of hand-tinting black and white prints has been around since the 1850s. Digital processing makes hand-tinting much easier since you can go back change each part of the image to your liking without worrying about ruining the original print.

To start, I had to repair the original image to get rid of all dust, bends, and scratches that were present on the original print. After cleaning up the image, I created various layers in Photoshop for various colors and portions of the image. The ground, chassis, truck body, trailer, tires, person, and background were all different layers in Photoshop. I colored over every part of the image in the appropriate layer and used the 'soft light' blending mode in Photoshop to help blend the colors to the tonalities of the original image.

I used various shades of the same color to give a sense of dimension and space to make the image more lifelike. I used various opacities, saturation adjustments, and hue adjustments to make the image appear as real as possible. I also had to do a little research online to find real color images from the same time period to make sure that I was using an accurate shade of the original color. After the entire image was painted, I saved my Photoshop work and flattened the image to create a Jpeg to post online. I made further Saturation and hue adjustments and also adjusted the levels to create the final image shown.