Restoration
The picture of A. Philip Randoplh is subtley marred by the shadow on the right side of his face. This is pronounced and distracts from this otherwise ditinguished photo of the leader of the 1941 Negro March; To restore it I used three separate features of Adobe Photoshop Elements: the spot healing brush tool, the sponge tool, and the auto sharpen feature. My perception was the lighting on the photo was causing distortions, though the line looked like a reproduction imperfection. The healing brush at a 5 pixel allowed me to methodically repair, though I need to redo and capture some of the photos original granularity.
Cropping
The cropping using the marquee tool was straightforward and I was able to eliminate a portion of the picture that included the "Corbis" label and was unessential. To give the new cropped photo some additional panache, after again choosing RGB color I lassoed the flag and gave it an off blue color (some research is required to determine if that is the right color for suffragism!) I also chose a texture to give the photo some granularity and make it look older and mre a period piece. This took away the appearance of a border which may hav some advantages depending on how I use it on my web site.
Coloring
Despite the nice reviews, I decisded to take a second pass at the coloring assignment and in fact tinkered for quite some time. The door handles and hubcaps both proved very challenging. I was able to use the opacity parameter (reducing to 60%) to bring forward the texture on the hubcaps. For the door handles I used the polygon lasso tool and magnified significantly to trace the very small area(I kept hitting enhance). Played around with several versions of "lighting effects" (too complicated) but did enjoy using the render effect under filter and clicking on lens flare--it is unbelievable--who designs this stuff!. I continued to have difficulty with getting the layers right; i.e., stacked properly; though the layer link tool is useful. My poor understanding of the concept of layers above background caused several mishaps.In working with the hubcaps I found the nudge tool helpful since I was able to forgo having to do each hubcap; simply copied (right clicked on layer and hit duplicate layer) and then used the nudge tool to size for each hubcap. Also in the filter tool I found accent edge and plastic wrap helpful to bring out an effect that may or may not be appealing but at least it allowed for some more Photo Shop gymnastics. As for painting,the wild red was a little much so i decided to tone down and to improve the paint job. Again I used the polygon lasso and chose this time to do sections of the car and then selected a darker red and an opacity of 50% to capture the texture. The paint job is better, not perfect and the picture will probably become part of my "Join the Army" page on the web site.
Vignetting
Since there was no official Negro March in 1941, the search is for pictures that are associated with this planned event. This march outside the Democratic convention in 1948 was led by A. Philip Randolph who had inspired the idea for the Negro March. Using the feathering technique I attempted to draw the reader toward accompanying text (have now inserted this on my Negro March Web page) and to eliminate a distracting building image that distratcted viewers from the words on the placards and the faces of the marchers. The second time I was able to produce a much better vignette than I had originally posted simply by using the black background layer as opposed to the gray which (was temporarily up on my web site under Negro March 1941) but just did not look right. This is one Photoshop technique that, like cropping, seems straighforward and relatively easy to accomplish.
Matting an Engraving
I want to create a basic template for my press page. So I took a basic PDF picture of a headline and created a layer and gave it a white background. I moved this new layer below my PDF layer and increased the image size substantially based on directions in guidebook (i.e., increased the DPI from 340 to 600). I enlarged the PDF and then saved it as a JPG. I then (and I still don’t understand this explanation in the guidebook) reduced the DPI back to 72 so it would not hog memory when opened. I then created three separate layers (a border layer Blue; a background layer- parchment -used the texturing features somewhat successfully) and then the text layer itself (had real problems with sizing). But here it is a template that hopefully I can use for all press articles on press page.