New Service Coming Soon
A very fast and not great job of colorizing an old picture. This picture is of my Dad and my Grandfather in the rail yard in Hutchinson, Kansas where they both worked.
This is the scanned file I started with.
It is almost a year since I launched Zodeman Studios. This has been a year of learning much and making little money. The first phase of my business has been to begin selling prints of my pictures primarily through having a show booth that I can display my work at various art shows, craft fairs, and flea markets. In the long run, I will be concentrating on the juried art festivals as that is where my work belongs. Since I was only able to get the booth up and going in July, I was not able to get to the really good shows last year. I did learn a lot and enjoyed the shows I went to despite not having a huge success, but not many businesses are a huge success in the first year. Now that the structure for shows is in place I can concentrate on the next phase.
I have been debating with myself on just what the next phase should be. Originally, I thought just using my photography skills and begin doing portrait photography would be the most likely path. Last summer I happened to attend a webinar with a guy who had begun doing digitization of old photographs because he had lost a bunch in a hurricane. He felt like it was a very important thing for people to do and I must agree with him.
For the last year, the skillset I have really been working on is not photography but processing the pictures once they have been taken. Actually trying to print out digital photographs so they look right is not as easy as one would think. What you see onscreen when you think you have a picture looking just right does not translate to a good print. I have greatly increased my knowledge of Adobe Lightroom and have finally learned and become comfortable with Adobe Photoshop. This knowledge leads right to the ability to digitize, restore, and colorize old pictures.
The file I started with. This is a picture of my Grandfather Bert Bruner and his sons.
A fast and not very good result.
With that said, my next phase is going to be offering these services so that people can save a cherished picture and get it upgraded to a new version that is saved digitally and can be enjoyed far more than the old version. There are many companies out there that will digitize mass quantities of pictures for you, and I am not trying to compete with that. I highly recommend using one of them to get most of your old pictures digitized. I am looking to take a few pictures that have a real meaning to people and get them restored to excellent conditions.
In preparation for offering this as a service of Zodeman Studios, I am studying several online courses I have found on restoring old photos. I had several pictures that have been scanned and are very low resolution, but I decided to use them as practice as I am studying. None of these are very good, and when I do this for real, I will be using a digital camera with a macro lens to capture the old photograph. That will give the ability to make them much sharper and be able to make a big print from them if desired.
The original file. This picture is of my oldest brother and my Dad taken when my brother had won a National Merit Scholarship through the Santa Fe Railway. Notice that’s the same locomotive as the picture of my Dad and Grandfather.
A fast and dirty colorizing.
I will have to learn more about the process and practice quite a bit more before knowing what my pricing would need to be, so stay tuned as I get ready for phase two!
