Myself+and+Cora

For this part of the assignment, I thought I would try to clean up one of my favorite older pictures from my childhood.

This photo was taken of me in 1976 with Cora Dodd, who was an elderly lady that lived next to my grandmother in Paris Crossing, IN. It's taken from behind of me and her on the porch swing, and I would have been two at the time. Cora died a few years back at the age of 100, and her house (shown here) I visited a few weeks ago and is now abandoned and falling down. Anyway....

I decided to use Picassa from Google, which is free. I've had it installed for some time, but haven't used too many of the advanced features. Let's see what it can do.

First, I had to crop out the rounded corners:

Next, I used a feature in Picassa called "I'm feeling lucky" just to see what it would do. I thought it actually worked pretty well. The button basically takes a guess at tweaking the photo for you. I was surprised by how well it turned out. It really sharped the color:

Next, I decreased the color temperature slightly and raised the highlights. I'm not sure this helped or hurt much:

Next, I did a little sharpening of the image. I found that in Picassa, you can also select an advanced editing tool that will take you into the Nero photo editor, and I tried making manual sharpening which is what I have below. However, Picassa has an auto-sharpen feature, which, quite frankly, I think did a better job than myself. But you could really get technical if you wanted.

Finally, I went back to Picassa and ran the auto-contrast feature just for giggles. I think below is about as good as I can get:

Below are some other features of Picassa I tried:

Warmify Sepia Soft focus Black and White