Cullomb & Mary-Anne

I've just rescued this picture of Margaret's grandparents for my friends Margaret & Ian Anderson. (The parents of my old friends from growing up, Gavin & Dougie.)

The original is about B3 (square A3) size, warped, torn, scratched, peeling, and the silver nitrate has become actually silver and very foxed. The date is a complete guess.

I discovered the trick for getting the scanner to see it. At first it saw the silver as a reflection, and the whole image was very very burnt out, especially the darkest areas and the lady's hat. But turning the green and blue levels right down and scanning only in red fixed it. Seems the silver was largely reflecting the green.

There's also high contrast and low brightness set at scanning time and a lot of playing with the grey level.

At the end of the stitching and healing, I desaturated and killed off the blue and green channels and made the red mono before making the image mode greyscale — doing it to all three channels lost the contrast.

Good result I think. It prints very nicely.