Mark visited a camera store the other day (we’re shopping around for a camera). While talking to the store’s owner about what we’re looking for, he mentioned that one of the things I do is work with old photos, including “healing,” improving faded, scratched images, and creating artwork based on that digital image. The man told Mark that working with old photos is a difficult skill to learn.

It is. I’m still learning. And the first thing I learned is not to approach it as photography.

Digital image manipulation has changed everything, and in a way, it’s brought us back to where we started.

Before cameras, pictures and portraits had to be sketched or painted. Photography brought the ability to “capture” an image. To change it, you could change lighting, how the image is framed, how long it’s exposed, but for much of photography’s history, seeing was believing. Making composite images wasn’t easy and most didn’t look real. Before color photography took off, the most common way to add color was to physically paint on the photo. Retouching meant actual touching.

But with digital photography, a picture ceases to be a photograph when it enters the computer.  Take a digital photo and increase the magnification until you can see the individual pixels. You’re seeing what the computer is telling you it sees. To the

computer, it’s not a photo — it’s data to be interpreted. Learning how the computer sees what you give it will help you figure out how to do what you want to do.

To work with photographs digitally, you approach them… as paintings. Look at those pixels. When you back out and look at the whole image, that part may appear to be one color, but when you zoom in, it isn’t. Even “black and white” images contain dots of color in every digital photo I’ve worked with. If you need to heal a scratch, or change something, you have to put away what color you think it is. Look at the colors the computer sees. That’s what you’re working with.

This is a family photo taken around the turn of the last century. It’s one of the few not labeled, so I don’t have a name. I decided to turn it into a digital art project for our Redbubble shop. This wasn’t a straight-ahead healing of an old photo. I wanted to emphasize certain things and omit others to produce an effect. Still, the process started with healing a scratched, faded photo over 100 years old.

It appears to be lighter and darker tones of one color (sepia), but if you look at that magnified sample from the original, you can see greens, yellows, even a rose tint.  When you’re healing scratches, brightening or manipulating the image, that’s what you’re working with.

It seems obvious, but the first thing I learned about working with digital images is you have to work with what you have, not what you think you have.

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