Thanks Heaven for Photoshop

When I was growing up, Dad was the designated family photographer. He had a nice SLR camera - at least later on - and he took pretty much all of the family pictures. Which was great, except that he mostly took slides, which is great, except that the only way we were ever able to view our family photos was to have a twice yearly family photo viewing night and watch a slide show on the living room wall. Which was great, it got to be a happy family ritual, but other than twice a year, we never viewed the family photos.

A couple of years ago, I bought a slide scanner, retrieved the family slides (all 7 trays or so) from my mom and went to work. I started in October, spent every minute I could spare on the project and finished just in time to complete my Christmas album. And I only scanned about half the slides.

But at least we have them, at least there are pictures in existence. And since one of the reasons I blog is to have a book at the end of every year to print for my family history, I'm going to start including some of these old family gems from time to time.

This is one of my favorites:


Isn't it great? It's my beautiful mom in labor with me and on her way to the hospital. Can you even tell she's pregnant? Amazing.

As I scanned all the slides, I had to spend several minutes on each one -bringing it into Photoshop and fixing it up a little. I couldn't spend a lot of time, but just a few clicks got me from this:


to this:


I could still work on this photo some more, but this is the result of about 39 seconds worth of Photoshop editing. Pretty cool, I must say.

If our houses were on fire - heaven forbid - I think most of us would retrieve our families, pets, and photos - everything after that would be replaceable. And I think it's cool that in this digital age, every photo I've ever taken of my family can reside on a 3" x 5" external hard drive instead of a trunk full of boxes of slide trays. Love that.

P.S. Doesn't my mom have pretty legs? This picture was taken almost 40 years ago and her legs still look this good. (She has pretty much that same haircut, too, actually.)

P.P.S. My Mom had me 9 months and 3 days from the day she was married.

Just thought I'd throw that in.