Re: Ok looking for a " grade " on my pixs....
I am far from an expert on photo-editing. I do spend a lot of time with old family pictures, repairing serious damage, photos as far back as 1890. I use Gimp, a free editor, different from Photoshop but powerful enough that it is sometimes used in professional shops, available for Windows and Linux.
I know nothing about Photoshop. Linux has some good plugins. My favorite is RESTORE. The color change of kodak prints over time and exposure to light is known. The plugin lets you set the degree of color fade, and then automatically adjusts the appropriate colors to compensate for that degree of fade. For a klutz like me it's a God send.
In the US, vignettes I am told are usually black, here in Mexico they prefer white vignettes. Also, Mexican women are gaga over sepia portraits, though GIMP has its own shade of sepia, which you will see below.
The following photo was a badly damaged picture postcard of a small Mexican mountain town in 1908. I am a newbie, so this fix took me all day and into the night. I am retired, so it is a labor of love, so to speak, a donation to the community. But, the local cultural director was very pleased. I told her it was a fraud. The missing body parts at the left, I copied and pasted from other men. She said it wasn't a fraud because she couldn't tell. I told her, no, it's just a good fraud.
I gave it to her 10X15 for display at cultural presentations.
I made it sepia because I don't know how to fix those washed out areas which are a totally different color, and sepia tends to minimize the differences. Any ideas?
