Behind the Scenes at the Blog No. 1: Retouching

(First in a series explaining some of the various aspects of doing this blog.)

With every post I do, I like to have some photo or image that is interesting or unique. Since I don't own any sort of archival photo collection, I have to get my images from somewhere.

Rather than poach images from other websites on the internet, I try my best to come up with things on my own. (Once in a while I do use images from other websites, and 99% of the time I either give them credit and/or a link back to that site so the image can be seen in its original context.)

Books are a good source, and I'm sure the gang down at the Black River Historical Society are used to seeing images from their great Arcadia Publishing Images of America Lorain book on many of my earliest posts. (By the way, if you don't own a copy of this or any of the other books featuring local cities in that series, they do sell them down at the BRHS, including the newest one on Sheffield Village by Charles E. Herdendorf.)

The best source for unique images for me, however, is the newspaper microfilm collection at the Lorain Public Library. Most of the time, the sheer inaccessibility of these images makes them rare and special, and thus desirable for use on this blog.

Images from microfilm, however, tend to look rather poor. They have all sorts of scratches, specks, dark edges and fuzzy blobs on them. Photos usually look atrocious, and ads are only a little better.

Here's a good example of what I mean. Below is an unretouched ad from microfilm.

And here is the same ad after I've cleaned it up in Photoshop on my Mac.

So if you ever wonder about those days when I don't post anything, it's probably a sure bet that I'm busy either looking for, retrieving or cleaning up images. (And that's even before I've written a word!)