Hey, who turned winter on?

Okay, one of you snow bunnies put in a request for winter weather, and I'm telling you to knock it off. Right now. I mean it. Don't make me come through the computer after you. growl

Last Friday we had about three inches of snow, which hasn't totally gone away, and now it's sleeting. Or maybe it's freezing rain. Whatever you want to call it, I don't like it.

That's right. I don't like snow. I'm more of a spring kind of girl. Give me warm breezes and blooming things -- especially forsythia, I just love forsythia -- and I'm happy.

I thought I ought to post something before I shut everything down for the day, because I don't want to lose anything on the hard drive if the power goes out. But before I pull the plug, I wanted to show off my mad Photoshop skills. I've been working on fixing some damaged photographs of Mama and Daddy, and I'm about done with the one of Daddy.

I've been wanting to fix these pictures for years, but never knew how ti could be done. Now that I've been teaching myself how to use Photoshop, I decided to see what I could do. I'd already fixed a photo of Mama's sister, and it turned out pretty good. 

Here's the before:

Isn't he just the cutest grumpy baby ever? He was about six months old, maybe a little older, here, in the latter half of 1930. My grandmother apparently had pictures of all her children done like this, with birth month-themed backgrounds. This one is for April.

The picture is a plastic coating over photo paper, and you can see what happens when you don't store your pictures properly. There are scratches and stains, in addition to the missing sides.

And here's what I've gotten done so far. I still need to do some adjustments, finish up repainting the right side, stuff like that, but it's close.

Nobody remembers for sure what the missing bits on the left looked like, so I used my own judgement to clone in the area. I did add two sheep on the left from another vintage image, because there was a tiny bit of one, but it wasn't enough to clone over.

I just love that whole clone stamping thing Photoshop has going on. It's made restoring this photograph much easier that I would have ever dreamed.

The two pictures I'm working on of Mama are going to be a lot harder than this one. They're in much worse shape, and one has most of the bottom missing. Poor little chubby baby toes! I'll post about those later, once I've made some more progress on them.

On the writing front, I've just about finished formatting the book for printing, though it's going a lot slower that I'd planned, since I decided to do some rewriting while I'm at it. I think the book is coming out much better, and when I'm done I'll reformat the ebook version and upload it.

That's all for now, Gentle Readers, going to close up shop until this storm passes. Take care, and try some photo manipulations!