Accessibility
This week’s readings on concerns of accessibility, were eye opening.
I’ve worked in web companies for 12 years and I can tell you from personal experience that only one of my teams ever discussed issues of accessibility during the course of a brainstorm, build or launch of a major site. And that’s terrible. Now I work for a company that provides services to government contractors and as such, accessibility is more at the forefront in people’s minds. Could be because it is more at the forefront of our customer’s minds, but whatever, it’s a start.
This is one of those rare instances where it seems that the government’s Section 508 compliance mandate is more ahead of the game than private industry. I also think this is a good place for digital historians to lead the industry. As Roger mentioned, if we think of these issues at the front of a digital history project — at the very stage of the brainstorm — accessibility requirements will fit more naturally into the flow of the project. As someone who is thinking about her intensely image-heavy project, it’s something I’m thinking about.
Comments This Week, March 29
I commented on Roger’s and Laura’s Accessibility posts.
I’m also playing with my new online, scholarly identity, so forgive me if I try on new blog titles and such.
Image Assignment and Comments
My image assignment is up. As I mentioned before, since the images for my final project are not old enough to need restoration and since I will not be working with engravings, I have a bit of a mishmash of family photos for my assignment this week. I do have historic photos of Mrs. Lee to use on my final project. I got them from the Glessner House Museum and someone there must have done their own restoration work, because the images are pretty good. My family photographs, on the other hand, needed a lot of work. I figured I’d take a gamble and work on badly aged images that I never would’ve attempted to touch before.
I still have issues remembering to create layers on which to perform my tasks, but by the end of the assignment I was better at reining in my spot healing wanderlust. (Ooh, spot! Fix it. Who cares what layer you are on.)
Additionally, my naming convention and file organization became very important — all things I will think of on the front end of the next photo project, instead of during it.
This week, I commented on Alexa’s restoration of John Horn, Lisa’s Photoshop addiction, Carrie’s assignment, and Laura’s assignment.
Colored Photographs: Not Just For Photoshop
I dug out an old box of family photos that I figured would hold a treasure of options for this project. I was right! (I have a ton of photos to deal with for my project, but none that need to be restored or colored, and certainly no engravings.. so I’ll have a bit of a mix for next week.)
And I came across a hand (machine?) colored image of my maternal grandmother when she was a toddler. But it struck me that this was a b&w photo that had been painted. It was her favorite photo of her as a child. I remember the b&w from my great grandmother’s house, but I never noticed before that this was colored after it was taken. And here I thought colorizing photos was just something that was done with Photoshop. I’m now very curious how they did it. On the original, you can even see the pink of her coat in the white margins of the photo.
I’m still working on my image assignment. I have one photo of my father’s parents that was taken when they were dating sometime in the 30s, that is badly faded. I want to see if I can get some of the image back, so I’ll restore that one. I have another of my mom’s mother that clearly had been folded or smooshed and now needs to have the folds removed. For my engraving, I found one from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated depicting a “doll charity,” which I plan to matte and colorize. (I also want to find out what they mean by a “doll charity” as I have never heard of this before..if I have time for a bit of research.. any body know?) So it should keep me quite busy this week.
Happy Spring “Break” all!
Comments: March 2 – 8
I commented on Carrie’s post and gave Sasha my two cents on her final project. Also gave Alex a huzzah for her glimmer of hope.
Confessions of a Photoshop Hack
I admit it. I’m a hack. I know enough about Photoshop to be dangerous, but not really enough to know if what I’m doing is correct. And after reading Katrin Eismann’s Photoshop Restoration & Retouching, I am flat-out breaking some cardinal rules.
I never use layers. Gasp. I just move the sliders around until I like what I’ve got. No! I don’t flatten my images when I’m done. Sacrilege.
Okay, kidding aside. I read this book and realized all the mistakes I was making and how they probably weren’t helping me get the most out of my own images, let alone restore or retouch historic ones. Not that I’ve ever tried this before last week’s class. Furthermore, I realize that I was using Photoshop in the most inefficient way imaginable.
Truth be told, I never effectively learned it beyond surface-level adjustments. Someone in the photo department at work showed me how to open, resize, crop, stroke, adjust some curves and sharpen images for use on our sites and I never looked back. For the last 6 years, I think I’ve expressed, at least twice a year, a desire to really learn it. To take a class. Or watch a tutorial or something. But I never found the time.
So I was very happy there was a Photoshop book and an images assignment on the syllabus. At least I hope to get beyond this basic understanding of what these things do. And I have to admit, I already know what I’m doing wrong. And potentially, how to fix it, so that’s a start, right?
As a happy coincidence, I have a bunch of photos to play with, so I tried my hand at some of the tone and contrast adjustments.
Take for example these shots of poor Mrs. Barnes, who asphyxiated in her kitchen.
The image on the left is the original shot. I’m terrible at calculating light and exposure, so I took an image that’s washed out and badly exposed.
I knew I wanted the colors to pop, so I adjusted the tone using curves and then fiddled with the saturation until I got the look I wanted. In the image on the right, the colors are richer. You can actually see the blues and reds in her apron and the auburn in her hair. More importantly you can see bright pink in her cheeks indicative of asphyxiation. Do you see it? (I did crop the image, which is why she’s much closer on the right. I promise, they are the same.)
Anyway, I’m not super thrilled with the ridiculously white refrigerator door, but given what is in the book, I can continue to tweak it and see what I come up with.
I haven’t tried hand-coloring since class. That was a bit of an explosion of peach and red on that poor man’s face!
Morris and Photo Staging
I am very impressed with how everyone has, so far, addressed the issues raised by the Morris readings. I know that as an editor of both a magazine and a website, I’ve made very specific photo assignments, because I needed a specific visual or emotion to match the accompanying story. The only “staged” images I’ve ever requested were for the express purpose of stock art. (I worked for an equestrian magazine and surprisingly, you can’t buy useful equestrian stock art at istockphoto..)
I won’t recap it here, namely because Clay, Kellie, Zayna, Ruel, Roger and Laura all do a fantastic job of starting an interesting conversation about the matter on their own blogs. But I do think it is worth noting that photos, like text, need to be read with the potential bias of their creators in mind.
As Dr. Larry Levine told us in his Reading Autobiography class back in 2003, reading autobiography as a primary source is extremely dangerous because each author was trying to present an image of themselves to the reader. Similarly, most photographers are attempting to evoke a certain perspective. Theirs.
While it’s impossible for me to fake images of these dolls (they are glued to the floor), I can use Photoshop to highlight certain aspects of the images, say by making the blood redder or more grotesque. It takes a light hand on the editing front and a sharp mind on the analysis. Much like with my colorization project, I’m still learning about the light hand.