The first problem was finding a group of images to work with. The valence (above) is from the Index of American Design, just as it appears on the National Gallery of Art website: see for yourself . It looks very nice, well preserved and professionally digitized. But what if you are working with an image that is old and damaged? How to improve an image without altering its historical value?
First came a man and a cat. 
They were pretty old and beat up, but after practicing for way too much time on them, they look quite different. This raises some questions of ethics, or at least historical accuracy. We deduced together in class that this man was wearing a Civil War uniform, and so we should color it blue.
But do we know that? And can we tell for sure that it is a Union uniform? What if he was a Confederate soldier? The Photoshop techniques we are learning are equally valid, but the story the picture tells is very different depending on the color of the man's coat.
I chose to give this man (and his cat) blue eyes, but have no way of knowing if he did, in fact, have blue eyes or not. The gold matting and green backdrop are my own invention, and should have no historical significance, but they may not reflect the taste of the time. Unless we can find a written account of the photograph, or the studio where the photograph was taken, we can not know.
So although the assignment was successful - this photo was cropped, restored, resized, and hand colored - the larger questions of digitizing historical photographs while preserving their accuracy are still out there. But what about a vignette? Here is what Photoshop can do for my daughter's new haircut: 
The second part of the assignment is to produce a matted engraving. In searching for an interesting engraving I came upon "The Six-Mark Tea-Pot" by George Du Maurier. This cartoon appeared in Punch on October 30, 1880, and is widely considered to be the first time Oscar Wilde is caricatured in Punch.
Du Maurier is alluding both to a painting by James McNeil Whistler called "Lange Leizen and the Six Mark Teapot" and to Wilde's famous remark at Oxford: "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china". In general Du Maurier is making fun of the entire aesthetic movement in mid-19th century art.
Lange Leizen and the Six Mark Teapot
This particular engraving was not damaged, only faded. I lightened the background in an attempt to duplicate its original look when it appeared in Punch, and sharpened the lines as much as I could. The result has much better contrast than the original, although the words of the Aesthetic Bridegroom and the Intense Bride are hard to read. This happened in moving the image from Photoshop onto the Web.
- cropped & resized image
- a restored photograph
- a hand-colored photograph
- a vignetted photograph
- a matted engraving
- a “before & after” of two examples
