Getting Past Newsprint

First, let me explain why I even care. My second grade teacher was Mrs. Alice McGinnis of Lyndonville, Vermont. I loved her. And when I grew up and returned to Vermont to visit, I visited her. On several different occasions. And we corresponded. So when a friend sent a newspaper clipping on the occasion of her 97th birthday in 2006, I kept it. (She has since passed on.) But, as you can see from the scan of the clipping, you can hardly make the poor woman out. So I decided to do my magic and get a decent restoration out of it. As a challenge.

Lou, Lena and Gene

As mentioned elsewhere in these pages, I had access to some old family photographs a few months ago; I hastily scanned them with my cellphone, and have been spending the past few months doing my best to restore them, using artificial intelligence as a tool to assist. And I decided to share with you my journey in restoring one particular photo, one taken in 1927 of two of my aunts and my dad's first wife.

Fotor Image-to-Image

Well, imagine you're an artist with a photograph you've taken. Now, you want to give it a new twist, maybe make it look like a cartoon or paint it in the style of Van Gogh. That's what Fotor AI does with image-to-image processing.

How Sharper Than A Serpent's Photo

Everybody wants sharp photos. Camera makers promise ever-more megapixels, TV ads scream about 4K and 8K, and your phone brags about its 108-megapixel sensor. But what do any of those numbers actually mean? And more importantly, do bigger numbers always mean better pictures? (Spoiler: not always.)

Digital Paintings

There are those who pick a medium—oils, acrylic, photography—and stick to it. There are others who pull in pieces, willy-nilly, using any tool they can find to produce the effect they want.

Fauxtography

Fauxtography is the word, recently coined, for special effects photos that seem to display something that can't (or, at least, doesn't) exist in reality. You know, like a photo of one person that looks like twins, or of a person floating in mid-air, or of an empathetic Republican.

HDR 2010

If you enjoyed my previous post of photos from my trip up Mount Lemmon, you might have noticed that a few of the pictures seemed to "pop out" at you more than others. You may also have noticed that some "professional" photos look better than yours, no matter how expensive a digital camera you have. And you might wonder, what are these photographers doing that you aren't? The answer is, they are creating HDR photos, arguably a step above mere digital. And the good news is, they aren't that much harder to create, and with a little extra effort, you can make HDR photos of your own.

Organizing Your Photos

On a recent visit to Key West, I met my daughter's mother-in-law, Snow, who has an enormous and well-organized library of photo albums filled with pictures taken throughout a long life spent traveling all over the world. There must be thousands of pictures in those binders. And yet, when she wanted to find one, specific photo of her sons and my daughter, she had it in her hands after less than a minute spent searching. Sadly, few people can claim to be as organized. In the days of film and paper prints, the majority of people stored their precious photos in shoeboxes; in these days of digital photography, when every phone is also a camera and everyone has a camera on his or her person during every waking hour, there are more photos than ever; yet, without a method of organizing the pictures, most people can't find any picture they've taken without a lengthy search—and sometimes, not even then.

I'm here with tips as to how you can accomplish that organization.

Digital Touchups

Photographers have always used any tool at hand to add interest to their photographs. I'm not talking about things like thought balloons or bunny ears; I have more in mind techniques that are a bit farther than adjusting overall exposure or sharpness, yet still well within what looks like a perfectly normal photo.