First Time Blogging

The SEO guides all mention that it's important for your website to have consistent, high quality new content. Blogging is suggested as a good way to deliver this, so let's give it a try.

I plan to post something each week. I will talk about things that are happening in the photography world. It might be things I'm working on, new techniques/features I've discovered, or anything else I think is interesting.

My focus has been on growing and establishing my business. Many of my parents' friends have expressed interest in restoring and colorizing old black and white photos. Having done a few, I can say that the biggest challenge seems to be getting the originals in a decent quality. Ideally, I would go to their house with my scanner and do the scanning myself. I set the scanner to the max of 1200dpi. That also makes enlargements are easy once the restoration work is done. It seems that the colorizing Neural Filter in Photoshop works better with higher resolution images as well. It's doing a sort of "statistical" analysis of the image to then feed into the neural network filter. If there's not enough data, the results are not always predictable. However, I'm getting more accustomed to selecting key areas and manually telling it what the correct color should be.

For any others looking to get into this, I would recommend the following websites to help with finding the correct colors:

• https://huebliss.com/ Hue Bliss has tons of articles on photography in general with a focus on colors. If I need a specific hexcode for a color (skin tone, wood grain, etc), I use Hue Bliss more often than not.

• https://colorpicker.fr/ This little app acts like the eyedropper tool allowing you to sample color from anything on screen. This is helpful if you have a sample image and want the exact hexcode of a particular color.

As I learn more, I'll be back to share more. I'm not sure if I want blog posts to become tutorials. Maybe I'll create a new section called "Tech Corner" or something and they can go there. Finding the balance between lots of little posts or more infrequent but more substantial posts will be the ongoing challenge.