Old Family Photos

Lots of old family photos are stuck in boxes in the loft or storeroom and no-one ever looks at them. Many are  tiny, grainy and faded.

With Picasa (which can be downloaded, free from the internet) I've been able to bring many of these old photos to life and in the process been able to pass them on to other family members.  
There are several ways of improving photographs.

One way is to use the cropping facility to look at the part of the picture which you're interested in, whilst still keeping the original photo on the computer.

Here's a good example - a photo of my grandmother (Bunty) staying at a friend's caravan back in the 1960s.  It's such a long time ago that no-one knows who the friend is so, apart from the retro caravan, the important part of the photo is  Bunty herself.

So it's been cropped and now we see Bunty and in greater detail:

When I become more adept  I'll learn how to delete the friend's shirt and tie - but that's for another day!

Another advantage is shown by next photo (taken about 1929) which was so faded that no-one could see what it was.  The photo was imported into Picasa and then I pressed the button 'I'm feeling lucky' and lo and behold my mother's parents appeared in their motorbike and sidecar:

Before (above) and after (below) 

Not as clear as today's photos but what an improvement!


Another very useful feature of Picasa is being able to straighten pictures. Take this photo from our living room window:

A great pic but the sea somehow doesn't look right. After applying straighten, the photo is a great improvement:

and it's less likely to make me feel seasick. As you can see, when a picture is 'straightened' it does lose part of the sides, so this can't be done with every picture.


Web Albums - coming ...