How Digital Photography Works

A photograph never grows old. You and I change,

people change all through the months and years,

but a photograph always remains the same.

How nice to look at a photograph of mother or

father taken many years ago. You see them as

you remember them. But as people live on,

they change completely. That is why I think a

photograph can be kind.

Albert Einstein

YOUhave to give Einstein a lot of credit when it comes to figuring out the big picture of the time, the universe,

and all that. But he obviously doesn’t know much about what can happen to photographs that don’t receive meticu-

lous care.

Once upon a time your ancestors were younger than you are. They were filled with life, color, and energy, and

although it was a rare thing to happen back then, they decided to have someone take their photograph. If we’re

talking ancestors far enough removed from the present day, it was a big event and your ancestors put on their

Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and their most solemn faces and stood still for a photograph that was, no less than the

pyramids, a declaration to future generations: “We were here and this is what we looked like and we mattered.”

Or it might have been a snapshot Mom and Dad took on their first date using Grandpa’s new Brownie.

Either way, these are more than photographs. They are pieces of time that can never be done over again. And way

too many ancestors are fading, peeling, crumbling, or serving themselves up as lunch for cockroaches in the attic.

A few years ago, that story wouldn’t have changed. If you could find all your old family photos, art restorers were

expensive and many of them didn’t guarantee their work for this lifetime, never mind the next lifetime and the one

after that and the one after that.

Then came Photoshop and its kind, and suddenly everyone’s a photo retoucher—a damn good one, too. It’s now

possible to restore a photo as well or better than the job done by the so-called pros. There are many ways to restore

photographs, and we wouldn’t be able to tell you all of tricks in just one chapter. But here’s enough to get you started

and show you how simple it can be.

If we had a picture of Einstein handy, we could even do something about that hair.

CHAPTER 10 HOW DIGITAL RETOUCHING RESCUES FAMILY HEIRLOOMS^163