Css Alabama historical background gallery
Vignette Image
Photograph of my father (far right) and friends in a night club during World War 2.
While this photo has nothing to do with the CSS Alabama images used for this project I couldn't pass up the opportunity to create a vignette of my father. It posed numerous challenges but the outcome was worth it in terms of experience and for personal reasons. Looking at the image above we can see that it is very faded and has yellowed with age. It is approximately 63 years old. My main interest in this image isn't so much in restoring the entire photo but rather making good use of what I think is a great pose struck by my dad.
First I cropped the image to isolate him (see above). I desaturated the it and then adjusted the levels to restore some contrast. I fine tuned that by adjusting the curves slightly. Since my goal was to use this image in vignette I had to overcome some additional problems. The iron railing that appears in front of my father (see yellow circle) posed several challenges. It cut across his wrist hiding the cuff of his jacket, his wrist, and the back of his hand. It also cast a shadow across his fingers (see blue circle). Finally it both cast a shadow and covers the rank badge on his left arm (see red circle). I could have solved these problems by using the portion of the photo above the bar but I felt that the attitude of his arm was important to the relaxed nature of the pose. I also felt that the uniform added interest to the photo from a historical perspective and so I wanted to maintain as much of that as I could.
To compensate for these issues I isolated the bar with the magnetic lasso and cut it from the image. I also used it to remove everything else other than my dad. I used the clone tool to recreate portions of the clothing and in some cases used the dodge tool to remove shadows. As I am not an artist it took several attempts to recreate a hand and wrist that looked accurate. I created the coat's cuff by copying some of the creases and seams from other parts of the uniform. For instance the edge of the cuff to the far left was made from the crease that appears over the eagle badge on the left arm. Bits and pieces of other creases that had the right angles were used to make the rest of the cuff.
Repairing the badge required a different approach. I knew that my dad's rank was technical sergeant 4th class. You can just make out the T on the badge in the original image. I searched the internet and found a site that had a good photo of that badge. 
I desaturated the image, changed it's size to match the photograph, rotated it to the proper angle and pasted it into the image. I used the burn tool to darken it to match the uniform. While the badge was mostly obscured by the vignetting process portions of it can still be seen that were not useable from the original photo.
The Restoration & Retouching book by Katrin Eismann described the process for creating a vignette image. A combination of motion and Gaussian blurs created a neutral background. I created a solid layer to sit on top of the image and used the elliptical marquee with a soft edge to cut out the window through which the photo is visible. Finally I used the lasso to isolate various elements of the image and colored them by setting the paint brush opacity to approximately fifteen to twenty percent. I asked my mother about my dad's hair color. As the youngest of seven children I don't remember my father ever having anything but gray or white hair. This image is the only time I've ever seen him with the red hair that he and two of my siblings shared. In fact I selected the hair color based on my siblings'.
Conclusion
The techniques used on the examples for this project offer a small glimpse of what can be recovered from damaged photographs. Photoshop offers multiple solutions to various problems, some of which are more suitable than others. Many of the most common problems can be corrected with the methods shown on this site. The ability to restore damaged photos provides a greater level of freedom when selecting images. As a historian, I can base my selections more on subject matter than on initial condition. Thus armed, I can use images not just to augment narratives but to help drive them by adding information that is not otherwise available. There are some things that we can best learn from a visual media. Good writing will always be an essential tool of the historian but it is not the only one.
- Kurt Knoerl
© Copyright 2006 | Last updated 18 March 2006
