Snow & White Balance

North Texas really got dumped on last week. Where I live (McKinney) got 7" of snow and we were lucky to only get that much. I'm not that crazy about snow. I know, it's sooo pretty, but I hate having to put my whole life on hold until it's safe to drive and businesses and schools reopen.

Growing up in NJ, we'd get several snowfalls per year. The most I can remember getting was about three feet! But in Texas, it's quite rare. We might get one snowfall per year in this part of the state, and usually no more than two inches and it's always melted within twelve hours. So to get THIS much at once was quite unusual.

BUT...it does make for some pretty photography...if you know HOW to take pics in the snow. Many pictures I see posted look very gray. The reason? A camera will pick the brightest part of a scene and make it neutral gray. You have to over expose your shot to get the whites to look white. When I went out last week,  I over exposed by 2 stops and it still wasn't enough. Luckily, I brought my gray card along so I could easily fix it in post.

A gray card allows you to set your white balance when editing a picture. By telling the software what in the picture is neutral gray, it corrects the color in the picture.

First, take a picture of the gray card in the exact light you're shooting in:

Most photo editing software has a white balance tool (I use Lightroom). By clicking the tool on the gray card in the picture, it changes to this:

Much closer to the real color of the scene. I then sync the settings in this picture to the rest of the pictures I took in the same light. Then I can play with the other settings (exposure and temperature) until I get something I like. The b&w pic at the top was done entirely in Lightroom.

The gray card I use is made by Whibal and I use it almost every time I'm shooting, indoors or out. 

Of course, casual shooters are probably not going to bother with a gray card. So, when shooting in snow, the key to getting accurate looking pictures is to over expose. 

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Restoring An Old Photo

I don't really market myself as a photo restorer and it's not really a service that I offer, but if a friend needs assistance I can usually provide something pretty decent. Recently, a friend presented me with a photo of her father taken in 1971. The picture had almost completely faded to nothing and she thought if I could do anything with it, it would surely be an improvement over what it was now.

First step was getting the photo into the computer. The photo was professionally framed & mounted and my friend requested that I do my best to keep everything as is and intact. So I took a razor blade and carefully cut the paper off of the back.

Here I found a piece of cardboard held in with small nails. After I pried back the nails and got down to the actual picture, I discovered the most probable reason for the fading: this was instant film. I don't know that much about what sort of instant b&w film was used in the past, but it was obvious that's what it was. The print was a very flimsy piece of laminated paper.

I did a high resolution scan of the picture. Here's what we had:

As you can see, it's almost completely gone. I told my friend that I might be able to improve it slightly and that the software can only work with the information it has. If the info isn't there, it's not going to come out. I told her the best we could hope for was giving it the appearance of a not-so-clean b&w scan out of an old newspaper.

Not much to work with, but I was hoping by scanning it at a high resolution that I could capture enough detail to get something usuable. I imported the image into Lightroom and gave it a simple grayscale treatment. Immediately the image jumped out:

This was already better than I had hoped for (gotta love Lightroom) and I knew immediately I was going to be able to pull a lot of detail out of the photo.

A few minor adjustments to the lights, darks and contrast gave me this:

Now it was time for Photoshop. I started the very much needed cleanup: removing dust and blemishes, fixing scratches and other damage, etc. The instant film had left these swirly rings all over the picture. I removed as much of it as I could, but in some spots removing the abnormalities made the image a look a little too "photoshopped" for my taste. Plus, since the image is only a 3X5, you probably wouldnt notice it in the print anyway.   

Truth be told, I could have spent several hours working on cleaning this picture up. It was more a question of if it really needed all of that work. I decided that it didn't and it wasn't worth the time fixing details no one would see unless they held a magnifying glass up to the picture. Altogether I spent about 2 hours. 

With the cleanup finished I added the finishing touch using Silver Efex Pro (a Photoshop plug-in), played with the lights, darks and contrast a little more and this was the final result.

Considering what we started with, I'm pretty pleased with the results. Now I'm inspired to go through my own old faded photos to see what kind of new prints I can create.

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