Digital Art Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Adding New Life to Old Photos

In This Chapter

• Spotting the artistic value of old photographs

• Using Photoshop touch-up tools

• Creating sepia tones in historic photos

Climb into a time machine by going up into your attic and pulling down those dusty old photos. There's gold up in them thar attics. What you can do in Photoshop with the old photos you find — tweak them for color, repair them, make them sepia tone, and so on — is nothing less than putting your relative's (or someone else's unknown relative's) past into the present and making it crystal clear. In this chapter, I cover auto and manual tweaks as well as adjustments to black-and-white (B&W) and color photos.

Taking an old photo and scanning and repairing it saves its life and can extend its life far into the future. Paper and film fade and are fragile. Conserving old photos helps ensure that these histories and precious images are around for generations to come.

Using Automatic Adjustments to Refresh Older Prints

Retro-based art — including photographs — is a saleable commodity because lots of folks want some piece of the past. Although recycling formal portraits is good, snapshots are just fine, especially if they contain nostalgic elements.

After you pull out your old photos and scan them, you can use the following Auto commands in Photoshop to try to refresh them and make them more clear and colorful. You can find these ...