Css Alabama historical background gallery

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• Introduction
• Restored Illustration
• Crop, Resize, & Restore
• Matted Engraving
• A Little of Everything

This assignment documents my attempt at image restoration and enhancement using several techniques within Photoshop for damage repair, matting, contrast correction, hand coloring, and vignetting. Each example utilizes multiple Photoshop tools. The first four images including the one above are from an upcoming online exhibit on the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama. The final image which combines nearly all of the techniques discussed in class lately is of my father during World War Two. While this deviates from the other images it offered interesting challenges requiring every technique I've learned so far.

Images and Narrative

The photos for this exercise were selected not only because of the technical restoration challenges they posed but for what they represented in terms of subject matter. Their use in an online exhibit on CSS Alabama will help illustrate several aspects of the vessel's history. Besides offering a chronological view of the ship's career the images relate the three main cultural aspects of a vessel at sea i.e. a ship as a machine, a ship as an element in a military or economic system, and a ship as a closed social community.¹ Hence the images I have selected for this exercise include the building of the vessel in England, a formal image of its officers (see above), a casual picture taken on deck, and engraving of its captain who figured so largely in the vessels reputation. The actual final museum project will include eleven images illustrating its history in greater detail. Each one will undergo some sort of restoration using the methods discussed on this site.

Click on the items in the top left menu or the "Next button below to see the images.

 

¹ Keith Muckelroy, Maritime Archaeology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 216.