Altering Old Photos

[mpizzazz]

I'm not sure where to post this.
In the late 80s my Mother made collages of a lot of old photos she found when she moved to her Aunt's house. She must have used every glue known at the time to glue the ORIGINAL photos together in the collages, like so:

McCormick Collage web.jpg (220.94 KiB) Viewed 809 times

This is about 1/4 of one of them and she did two. The other one I took apart a few years ago. Those were all one of kind photos and it took forever. This one I could be a bit more ruthless as a lot of the photos I had duplicates or the photos were not people I wanted to preserve. I could sacrifice some to save the ones I wanted. I spent the last few days on it. Dripping water between the photos helped to loosen some of the glue quite a bit. Other glue wouldn't budge and circles of scotch tape were nasty to remove also so I just had to tear them.

Anyway, moving on, eventually I got the photos I wanted. I rescanned them all and this is one of the groups:

img735 web.jpg (105.49 KiB) Viewed 809 times

Then Photoshop and I spent several hours together working on the 6 photos that I wanted to add to Mom's album. Here is one of them.

Mugs and Margaret 1929 web copy.jpg (61.46 KiB) Viewed 809 times

Then, of course, when I go to print them out, I can never get a decent looking sepia or color print that looks like the real aged photos. I ended up with about 3 of each so I played around on one set with a yellow Pan Pastel. It looks pretty good. You can rub off a lot of it so it just leaves a soft yellowish tint. Then I also tried a little color tinting and the Pan Pastel leaves a nice soft bit of color. I can't use anything wet because these are inkjet prints.
See photos in next post.

[mpizzazz]

Here is an example of two of them after they were printed and the Pan Pastels were added. Just yellow on the top one and a few colors on the bottom one. I'm not including the colored one in the album, just the ones with the yellow.
Original photos along side.

IMG_6976.JPG (119.84 KiB) Viewed 807 times

Just thought the Pan Pastel idea might be useful for other people.

[ChristyB]

oh my.
what a lot of work but the end result is so worth it.
Fantastic!


I've used pp to color photos once before but had forgotten about it, thanks for the reminder.

You have some really great photos to work with.

[pamcook]

What a project. I'm impressed. Seriously.

[jfugina]

What a massive undertaking! But it looks like you're very much on the right track - because you're getting spectacular results. I think you'll be very happy that you went to the effort when all is said and done.

Nice job!!!

[Trixie]

Have you tried Undo? It devolves adhesive and usually doesn't leave a mark. I have used it many times.

Judy

[mpizzazz]

I think I might have used Undo when I did the other collage a few years ago. I had a bottle of it hanging around for years and probably used it all up. I know I tried everything with that collage because they were all precious.
What prompted me to use water was a comment on a photography site. Water was used to process photos and even if they are stuck together from floods or rain, if they are kept wet and soaked in water they will separate eventually. These old black and white photos are so stable, you don't know if you could do this with modern photos. I was just lucky that for this lot I could sacrifice some to save the others so it didn't take many days to get the ones I wanted. And the best tool of all to use is a finger and fingernail to rub the glue away.
I had never realized until I enlarged it on the monitor that the one photo of my Mom said "at 6 months" on it in white ink. It's the one of the baby in the rocking chair in the first scan. That means the photo was taken about June of 1919. Pretty amazing!

[azemigh]

What a fantastic treasure you are preserving. I was going to suggest the Undo as well. I have also had some success using the heat gun (held far away) and softening the glue that way.

[troublesmom]

Awesome job Marianne.

[Debbie J]

I love the end result after the pan pastels. Looks so aged to perfection!

[mpizzazz]

Thanks for all your comments. If anyone has any suggestions on printing them out with a real looking sepia tone, let me know. They are always too reddish brown and not yellow enough.

[pbp908]

It's amazing that with all of the advances in printing and camera technology that the old photos are much more stable and in a lot of cases the image is crystal clear. There are days when I'm lucky to get anything in focus even with auto focus.

It's also pretty amazing how poorly old photos are treated. They're stuck on that black acidic paper with Scotch tape, trimmed within an inch of their lives loosing all of the historic background, crumpled, folded, people cut out of them, thrown into magnetic paged albums and whatever else could happen to them. I'm restoring an old photo printed on matte paper that had coffee spilled on it. Crazy.

Marianne, you're doing a great job with those. And I can't get a decent sepia tone, either, or a good B&W. Must be this darned modern printing equipment. The best I've found is to use a brown photo filter and then to adjust it to suit the level of tone that you want. You might also try the sepia option at photofunia.com. I haven't tried it yet but who knows? It might work.

[mpizzazz]

It really surprises me how they did abuse the few precious photos they had back then. Considering that it was a real luxury for ordinary country folk to have a photo taken, they didn't treat them well at all.
Thanks for the suggestions, Pam, I thought you might have some ideas.

[Keitha]

What a treasure of photos to work with, and you're getting wonderful results Marianne. I agree with you on trying to get an authentic B&W or sepia-toned photo on a modern printer; I wonder if you could save your image as B&W and then treating it as if it were a colour photo, manually adjust the tint to the colour you want? Another thought is, if the tone seems right but it's too bold, try printing at less than 100% colour gradation. And I also wonder if, with all the photography smartphone apps there are, if there isn't one that would do it; you'd need to put your photo in something like Dropbox and then work with it in the app. Of course, that would require having said smartphone; has anyone found an app with a decent sepia or B&W filter?

I hope you'll share your pages when you get them done.

[mpizzazz]

Me, with a smartphone!??and apps!? surely you jest?

Actually I wasn't planning on sharing the layouts. I have to make them fit into what is already in the album which I did the bulk of in the late 90s-early 00s, need I say more?