Yeah, starting with a small image is problematic. I think I have the original photo in an album in the storage unit. I should get it and re-scan it. That way I’ll have a nice large image that won’t need much work.
The other photo is from 1976, and was posted with the For Sale ad for a while. And it was an overcast day when it was taken. I ‘fixed’ that photo in Ulead PhotoImpact way back when I had a PC and made my first webpage. It looks better than the original, but still needs work. I’ll re-scan that one too.
Then I think I’ll buy a copy of Photoshop Elements (I think it’s called) and see what I can do.
Thanks, everyone, for retouching the photo in the OP.
Elements is a great program, especially the relational database for organizing, but unless you’ve worked with editing tools before, you’ll need some instruction (self or other) to get the most out of it. Other great features: export for email (auto resizing) and Facebook, creative tools for making calendars, etc., being able to do mass tagging of like items; so if you want to tag all of your plane photos for easy retrieval, you just highlight all the plane photos, create a tag called “planes”, drag and drop the tag on one of the highlighted pics and all will be tagged. Then when you do a search five years from now for “planes”, they all pop up.
Instead of scanning the photo, you might try taking a macro photo of it in RAW. That way you get no compression and can edit to your heart’s content without any major image degradation.
Shooting raw is good for retaining details that exist in the shadows and highlights of real life, but I wouldn’t recommend it for any image that’s already been fixed — it’s more likely any hidden details that would be captured would be smudges, creases, etc of the print, and the way one has lit the item to be photographed.
I would advise scanning to a TIF or Photoshop file, 300ppi @ 100% and work from that image. When you have a sufficiently large source image, Photoshop’s Auto-toning tools can often yield good results. And Photoshop has many non-destructive editing tools. If not, I’m sure any of us would be happy to have another crack at a higher-res image.
Also, some scanning programs, such as the professional version of VueScan, will generate raw DNG files for you, too. Those give you the most flexibility, but a well-scanned file saved as a losslessly compressed TIFF is about just as good.
