Old photos can bring back long forgotten memories, give us a visual insight to an earlier time and place. Often times, the photos are of a degraded quality and the photo paper can be flimsy or torn.
Recently, I came across an old photo of my mother (she’s on the left) and my aunt, when they were young children. I was fascinated with how they looked, how they dressed and how their lives might have been back then, all those years ago. Also interesting to me was the background. I remember that lilac tree from my childhood. It’s the only memory of that backyard that sticks in my head, that brings up memories of my grandmother’s home. I spent many hours sitting under that tree and smelling the fragrant blooms, lugging out coloring books, comic books and toys, which kept me entertained for hours.
The picture quality was grainy, blurry and the paper was wrinkled, faded and torn. None of that mattered to me though because what was important was the glimpse it gave me into my mother’s young life, all those years ago. The emotional impact of it far outweighed the quality of the picture or paper.
There are photo scanners that excel at copying old photos but I was not about to buy one of those. There are phone apps you can use to scan photos too but I’ve never used one. I was more than satisfied to rely on my i-Phone and took three photos from different angles. My photos load automatically into dropbox with my dropbox app so I knew I could quickly and easily download the photos from dropbox onto my PC so I could then open the photos in Photoshop and make a few minor editing tweaks before scrapbooking a digital page with them.
When I photographed the original, I framed close enough to capture just the photo, not the photo paper edging for two photos but left some of the border on the third pic. I knew that I would be using frames, brushes and masking so the original photo border wasn’t really needed and it’s easy enough to add a stroke border in Photoshop, if desired, later in editing. Two things I almost always do with old photos is to create a curves adjustment layer in Photoshop so that I can tweak the highlights and/or shadows a bit, and the other thing is to do some selective sharpening, especially on facial features. This is done with a light hand because often the old photos are grainy so too much sharpening just increases that. This photo was a lovely faded sepia tone so I thought that one of the (3) photos might look interesting in a black/white conversion, against the sepia tone. I applied a bit of sharpening to their faces, and lightened the shadows and decreased the highlights a smidge. I wasn’t looking to greatly improve the photo, just wanting to slightly enhance their facial features. Duplicating the photo layer, then changing the blend mode, can work to further enhance the photo (adjust the opacity of the blend mode as desired).
It’s a personal preference as to what products you might want to use to create your digital layout but here are the ones that caught my eye in the store that I knew would work wonderfully for my old photo.
Mixed Media Monthly – Mar.’17 https://the-lilypad.com/store/Mixed-Media-Monthly-Mar.-17-Strengthen-Family-Ties.html
Little Butterfly Wings – Our Legacy Kit https://the-lilypad.com/store/Our-Legacy-kit.html
Sahlin Studio – Country Road Kit https://the-lilypad.com/store/country-road-kit.html
Lynn Grieveson Designs – Worn Page Framer Tempaltes https://the-lilypad.com/store/Worn-Page-Framer-templates.html?keep_https=yes
Lynn Grieveson Designs – Worn Photo Edges And Borders No.01 https://the-lilypad.com/store/Worn-Photo-Edges-and-Borders-No.01.html
Shop by Theme (Heritage section) https://the-lilypad.com/store/Heritage/
Shop in the Ephemera section of the store https://the-lilypad.com/store/Ephemera-c-834/
Thinking how life and the world around me has changed over the years (I’m 60 now), it fascinates me to look at old photos and try and envision what that time was like, how did it differ from the current time, how did it affect my life, or my family or friends? How might my life have been had I been back in that time? I have many old photos that I will scrapbook with over the upcoming months and many of the people in the photos are unknown to me, they are part of my family tree, my ancestors, but I don’t have much information aside from that. My layouts will feature those photos but the thoughts and feelings about them will be from my perspective as I don’t have theirs. It will be fun to journal about my thoughts, my suppositions about what the photos entail.
When working with old photos, don’t stress about the quality of them, embrace the imperfections in them and incorporate that into your scrapbook page design. Here is the layout I created with the three copies of the original.
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