Photoshop Magic

Laura and I are finding a social group here in Missoula. Last week, we went out three times during the weekday and actually stayed out until past 10:30! Friday we spent the evening playing board games and cards. I participated in a game of Scrabble while Laura played Crazy Bee Rummy. That was only my second time of playing Scrabble but I still managed to break 100, so I was happy with 2nd place.

Saturday we did our taxes. Laura really likes to do taxes for some weird reason and she was wanting to do them two weeks ago. I finally gave in and we put our minds to work. It took us about an hour to file our Federal and Montana state income tax forms, and it appears we will be receiving a small refund. Just like last year, we plan to invest the money since we consider it to already be out of our pocket - we can live without it now, so we will put it aside and have more later.

Around 4:00 I started doing some work on an old photo of my great grandparents. I like to use Photoshop when I work on pictures, it's a professional style photo editor and it is a little intense if you don't know what you are doing. Although, it can do some amazing stuff! Here is the picture of my great grandparents of my paternal side of the family tree. Judging by the age they appear to be and knowing that they married in 1914 and he died in 1929, I suspect the picture was taken around 1914 or 1915. He is wearing his wedding ring, and they appear to be dress up for an event. Also, there are no children in the picture, which you might expect of the time period if they were all dressed up and having a picture taken.

The picture isn't in terrible condition, but is in bad shape and can be fixed with a little work. First of all, I scanned this picture while we were in Kearney over New Years. The picture I scanned it from was a printed version of a scanned picture of the original. So already we have a third generation copy of this picture and any time you take a copy of an original it loses it's quality. So the third generation is a little worse than I like to work with, but then again, the picture is around 90 years old, so I will take what I can get.

The first thing I did was remove the rips from the left side and then remove the dust and scratches from the picture. I decided to not venture far from the original look so I left it at that. However, I have been reading on the internet about coloring black and white pictures so I decided to try my hand at coloring the photo as well. Around 2:00 a.m. I decided I was satisfied with what I had for the time being and I finished the picture this morning. I guess I am happy with the result for now. For my first attempt at coloring an old photo I think it looks rather well. Hopefully I can get some more old family photos and touch them up, maybe add some color to a few of them as well. I kind of like working on the old pictures.

Sunday we did some geocaching and planned out our route for our first day of our spring break trip. We decided that a trip to San Francisco wouldn't be too bad, so we have started getting ideas for the trip and I have a feeling we won't be able to see everything we want to see. Before we leave though, we need to get the car working a little better. We usually get 25 miles/gallon at worst, but since our trip to Nebraska we have been getting 21/22 mpg and that adds up over a 2,000 mile trip!

Today I have a pile of dishes in the sink and the apartment is a bit of a mess, so it looks like I will be doing some work around the house and get it looking good as well. Our hopes of staining the headboard fell through since it was raining all weekend and temperatures didn't get above 35. We are still waiting to see the sun which disappeared a week ago and I suspect when it returns we will find a day to get that completed. Until then we will just wait, and until again

-=Nolan=-