Digging through the deep archives of my family I discovered a picture of Earle Burgum, who lived from January 2, 1891, until November 10, 1964. I scanned the 3” x 5” photo and the original pict file was somewhere around 7 MB. First off I reduced the image and cropped it to a more manageable size. The photo was black and white, but I had saved it as and RGB image so I changed the mode to grayscale. Next I played with the levels. I adjusted the black and white sliders. This added some much needed contrast, but it was still a bit faded so I used the midtone gamma slider to darken the image somewhat.
      Toward the bottom of the image there were a lot of scratches. These marks were significant enough that I felt I couldn’t use the Dust & Scratches filter without further softening the image. I took care of these marks using the clone stamp tool to even out tones. By employing the lasso tool I selected the shadow and used the dodge tool to lighten the shadow in order to get contrast between the shadow and Earle’s pants.
      I also used the clone stamp tool to eliminate a large mark on Earle’s jacket near his pipe. After doing that I attempted to get some detail back into his hand. I needed to do the same thing to his face, but thought perhaps experimenting on the hand might be a wise choice. I used the lasso tool to select the area and then picked a medium sized brush on the burn tool to get some definition. It worked okay so attempted the face.
      I had been very conservative in the use of the burn and dodge tools around the hand, but I became a bit overconfident and mangled his face a few times before returning to my more gentle use of these tools. I still didn’t get the effect I wanted so I tried the Unsharp Mask filter. This worked well, but created problem around the edges of the area where I had used that filter. I had to use the clone stamp tool to average out some of the more troublesome pixels.
      The process of using the lasso tool and the burn/dodge tool worked very well on the hat where I was able to get some definition where it had faded into the background. I also defined the ear which had blended in with the background. To bring out some definition in the tie I experimented with the magic wand tool, to select the stripes which I filled using the paint bucket tool. For the rest of the tie I opted to go back to the dodge tool.
      Finally I took a stab at colorizing the image (I think old Uncle Earle would’ve liked it that way). I changed the mode back to RGB and using a combination of the lasso tools I selected his suit and picked the least offensive color I could find. I then picked a medium sized airbrush tool with 3 percent pressure. This process was repeated again and again for each color. The skin tones were created using the values R: 213; G: 172; B: 129.
      The final stage was to “vignette” the image. Using the elliptical marquee tool I framed the image and added a Gaussian Blur of 25 pixels. I also added a half a percent of noise to reduce a banded look. This didn’t quite work because the blur kept running to the edge of my image and giving me a hard line to my vignette. I went back and added 20 pixels of Gaussian Blur with one percent of noise. I then filled the background with white and Uncle Earle just jumped off the page at me.