Cropping

My first adjustment was to crop the image to a smaller size. I wanted to cut out most of the background, as I planned on coloring it later on.

Coloring

Next I took some time with the magnetic lasso tool to isolate the dress. After selecting it I was able to color it. I then followed the same procedure with her earrings and the background, on which I used a gradient effect.

Vignetting

Finally, I followed the vignetting procedure described by Eismann in Photoshop: Restoration & Retouching to create a nice framing of the photo. What is great about this technique is that by creating a new layer on which the vignette effect occurs it can easily be modified to match the coloring of an website. I then resized this as shown below.

Restoring

I took another photo of Bessie Smith that was overly dark on one side and attempted to even out the lighting. I tried a few of Eismann's techniques for this including some digital flash techniques, but settled on her method for balancing exposure a fading. It is a difficult process which requires a lot of tweaking and fine tuning. The images follow the process of cropping, balancing, and recoloring.

I am not sure I was at all successful, but you can judge for yourself below. Compare:

Matting an Engraving

I forget exactly when I found this, but I saw it in a folder where I keep images I think are interesting on my hard drive and it seemed an excellent candidate for this part of the project. I began by cropping out the card from the background of the original photograph. Then I corrected the alignment and cropped it again. I then when through the process we practiced in class to change the background color. I finished by cleaning out a few stray marks, and erasing the border and the fine print to make a more plain image. These steps are illustrated below. During this process, I learned that when the color of the engraving is similar to the background color you can not stray too far from that background color. I tried playing around with grays, reds, and other colors, but each time the helmet was lost.