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First Tux

Church Memorial

20090502-DSC_0046-4.jpg

Party of 10

[Mhayes]

I decided to do a test run with the nonreflective glass. Granted the picture was in good condition and not curled, but I wanted to see how much the glass softened the picture. I did need to move my lights back to reduce the glare. See if you can tell a major difference between with glass and without.

Margie

[Hannie]

What a cutie!!
If my eyes aren't playing tricks on me I'd say the second photo has a very slight blur, hardly noticeable.

Hannie

[kiska]

Yep. The top photo shows some spots.

[Mhayes]

Darn those tell tale dots! Kiska make the right call as Baby A was shot under the glass. Yes Hannie,granddaughter Jessica is still a cutie some 22 years later.

Margie

[RosyBijou]

Here's another idea from Katrin Eismann's Restoration & Retouching (p 189-190, if you have the 3rd edition), for reducing glare:  it is geared towards an image that was heavily silvered (those really old metallic ones...), but perhaps taking a second photograph (with just this technique in mind) might be of use to the person picking up the image if the glare seems to be an unavoidable monster...  Something to consider for you angel photographers making those image collection runs.

Because of the silver in the image, photographing or scanning the image brings reflections from all over if done straight on.  The author described how the restoration artist was able to minimize most of the silvering by tilting the image to an extreme angle--however this changes the image shape from a rectangle to a trapezoid shape--because of the perspective issue.  He then converted the image to grayscale, which got rid of the remaining silvering.

Enter the beauty of Photoshop... Now that the reflections are gone, the restorer used the warp transform tool (with guides) to return the image back to it's original rectangular shape, this time minus the reflective silvering. 

Now, I don't know if this would work on white dots or reflections through glass or acetate album pages.  It might be worth a try to sample this on a few different types of reflective problem surfaces to see if it's of use.  It's definitely useful for the old silver metallic prints...

I recognize that not everyone uses Photoshop and I don't know if other programs have similar features as the warp tool, but I did use this technique once on an old silvered restoration and it was very effective.  The damage on my image was minimal, but getting the image scanned without those blasted reflections was nearly impossible.  Once I remembered this, I figured it couldn't hurt to try taking some tilted pictures of it, and it worked!  I am not a photographer, and admit that I was lost at the beginning of this thread with the discussion of the light temperatures & the technical aspects of photography.  One of these days, I'd like to take a course to learn more about the photography end of images, but for now, I'm thoroughly smitten by the digital manipulation of the images that I have on hand... still so much to learn on this end...