Snerkology

I mentioned that I recently dug up four rolls of unprocessed film, from goodness knows how long ago, that were hiding in some old purses in the back of my closet. I took them to Walgreens to get developed, and the photo technician recommended that since the film was old, instead of developing prints, I should just have the images put onto a CD. That way I wouldn’t be stuck with prints of low quality images. And, of course, I could be free to Photoshop the heck out of whatever was on the film.

This is one of the pictures from the mystery film. It’s of Calvin holding Devlin when he was about a month old, in December of ’04 or January of ’05. This is the original image from the film:

Then I applied some mad Photoshop Skillz. And a couple of handy actions. First I removed some of the “noise” by despeckling the photo, and ran a noise reduction, both from the “filter” menu. Then I ran Totally Rad Actions “Boutwell Magic Glasses” to clarify the image. I ran PW’s “Slight Sharpen” action to define it a bit more, then ran “Lovely and Etherial” to soften some of the harsher areas of light. Finally, a “Quick Edge Burn” to draw the eyes toward Devlin’s sweet little face, and voila. This is the result:

Here’s one of Robert, from around the same time, so he was about 18 months here. Original image:

First, using the spot healing brush, I removed the spot that was on his shirt, and the tiny scrape that was on his forehead. Then I applied the same despeckling and noise reduction methods. I ran PW’s “Slight Sharpen” (I found “Boutwell Magic Glasses” to be too harsh), then ran PW’s “Warmer” action to, well, warm up the image. Here’s the result:

I love Photoshop.

I miss those boys.