Heritage Photos – Learn Something New Every Day

I've been on a heritage photo hunt since taking Katherine Weaver's Photo Restoration class using Photoshop at Scrap Girls earlier this year.

Today, I scanned in this tiny photo of my dad from a 1937 newspaper. The original newspaper is yellowed and quite brittle. In addition, the photo of my dad is only about an inch tall.

I knew right away that I would want to scan at a very high resolution since the image was so tiny. I used the max – 1200 dpi. To my dismay, the scanned image emphasized the graininess of the 1930s newspaper printing technology. Duh.

Undaunted, I expected that today's computer technology would have a way to correct this. So I went to rescan the photo while looking carefully at all the advanced options. One option is Descreen. That sounded right to me. My first attempt looked like it had been photographed through a screen door or printed with fairly large dots creating a screened effect (double duh).

So I checked "Descreen" and unchecked "Unsharp Mask" – only because the computer warned me these two options might not work well together. This is what I got – a photo of my dad that I can definitely work with – thanks to the photo restoration techniques I learned in Katherine's class.