This is a restoration that makes me proud of who I am. Grandma who is no longer with us was born in 1900. This photo is approximately 80 years old. Photo's of this era hold up much better than color photo's that are only 10 to 15 years old. Black & White photo's from the beginning of the 1900's had small grains of silver that absorbed light, instead of reflecting light. "see a.)" on the Photoshop page.

The photo had been wiped clean with some type of solution that left streaks. There were many artifacts and spots when viewed at 100% in Photoshop. I spent a lot of time viewing at 200 and 300% and using the Rubber Stamp tool cleaning up the image. I must admit I did some work in Painter with the Photo Brush, but the majority of the restoration was done in Photoshop.

If you look closely at the lower left hand corner hypertext link to a close up use back button to return a part of the chair and window are missing. We are fortunate to have a Wacom Tablet that makes the Rubber Stamp tool a joy to use. I cloned as much of the area to rebuild that portion of the photo that was missing. You can view the finished area hypertext link to a close up use back button to return of the window and chair.

We have and older HP II2CX flatbed scanner that after you install enough memory you can set the resolution at 1600 dpi. and millions of colors. It takes a while with some noisy grinding but like our transparency scanner the more data you acquire with the scan will give you a larger file for a fine art print. You should not scan more data than your system can handle. These days memory is very affordable and Photoshop requires a lot, and when your scanning into Photoshop, image size adds up very quickly. All 3 books "see b.) c.) d.)" on the Photoshop page offer good sound knowledge in the mechanics of scanning images.

I did a lot of editing in RGB mode, if you use other programs such as Painter keeping the RGB format makes the image portable between programs. After you are satisfied with your restoration it's time to convert the image to Greyscale. Then I made a Duotone using Pantone Coated Process, for this image I used Pantone 457 CV. Setting the curves for the Duotone is a very important pre press step. A good tutorial can be found in "see d.)" on the Photoshop page, Chapter 21.

When working with the Fujix Pictograph 4000 you get a fantastic image at 267 dpi. If you use the Fujix Pictograph 3000 you must set the dpi to 320. Both machines produce long lasting images but the Fujix 4000 has larger output sizes. I had to save the file back to RGB for final output on the Fujix Pictograph.

Fujix Pictograph 4000 testing results. Updated 12-14-2000.

For a look at the final image hypertext link to image use back button to return "Looking out the window".