Montage: Research

When I think of Montage (and collage for that matter), I immediately think of those popular in the 60s; to name the main ones David Hockney, Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton. So I will use this post now to discuss how I feel about the work of these artists, before moving onto this day and an age and the sorts things people are doing with digital montage these days.

David Hockney:

After spending most of the 60s and 70s painting his famous scenes of people splashing about in LA, and pictures exploring his personal friendships at the time, in the 80s he focussed more on the collage. He had always used photographs to copy from when painting/drawing, but with his collages he was now using his camera as part of the process to address the limitations of both painting (in its reliance on subjective, psychological ways of seeing) and photography itself (as he claimed it only really gave a geometric view of the world) (1). In short, his collage work was a way of seeing things from different perspectives all at the same time.

Pearblossom Highway (1986).
Hockney views collages such as this as- not photography- but drawing:  "Because there is no single way to join them. If you make a decision about something like that, isn’t that exactly what you are doing when you are drawing?"

Something to note here- from what was evidently the pre-photoshop days- is that he is taking pictures of the same scenes (for 8 days in the above example (2)), meaning he does not need to cut anything as people are prone to do in collage up until this point, and as aim to do in my digital montage. This is quite a natural way of of working and achieving the right tones within the gamut of colours, but obviously a lengthy one.

Place Furstenberg Paris (1985)
This is what I meant. It seems more than just taking pictures around the same area and placing them together.  The act itself almost creates its own new texture in the road spaces. This reminds me of the patternisation when using the clone tool in photoshop, for although we are going for a smooth clone, sometimes its nice to leave it looking rough for artistic effect.

Peter Blake

Best known for his collage for The Beatles's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band (1967), Blake's work combined characters and scenes from folklore and literature with fine art strokes. His collage is more traditional, involving cutting and sticking pictures and "found" materials and arranging them in his own style, unlike Hockney's own photographs of one particular scene.

Blake's most famous work: The Beatle's Sgt Pepper.... album cover. Work such as this cemented Blake as true component of the Pop Art movement. Since I have collected many
 pictures from my family's history, I reckon my own montage will be more like this with obvious digital enhancements. Basically, a multitude of images arranged in different ways.

The Convention of Comic Book Characters, 2012.

And he's still working today.

Jack Lloyd

Been a fan of this guy for a while now; ever since I happened across his gallery and shop in Chorlton Manchester. Indeed, during the same time as I was working on my montage this time last year, I drew inspiration from Jack, and his work, which is based around areas of local significance. The ironic thing is, some of the places he uses in his work don't seem all that significant to those who witness them every day of their lives, but his use of colour and the way he arranges his images (for he photographs everything himself) allows us to see them in new light, and after all, what is art for, but to paint the everyday in new ans exciting ways?  

Lloyd's is the type of work that I aspire to: good to look at and commercially successful. It is also the type of work that I often think "oh, that's done in photoshop, I could do that", whilst at the same time being completely aware that this is his own style and I wouldn't know where to start copying it.

Manchester One.
This one is on the Saatchi Gallery website, but not for sale. It comes as no surprise that Lloyd's work has been accepted to the site. I'm always amazed at the vibrancy of clours. I've no idea how they appear so vibrant. On his website, he catalogues his work according to place name, but inside this he depicts different areas, such as Chin Town above. Very conceptual.

1)   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/8782275/The-many-layers-of-David-Hockney.html
2)   http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-lancashire/plain/A520840

Montage: Down to Business (Evaluation)

Original Image Vs. Canvas

What became apparent when I was working on my collages/montages this time last year, was how there are two different ways to start a montage: with an existing image or with a newly-created canvas. The example in my previous post (mother holding baby) is from an original scanned image. I think the issue here, is that the image quality is not as good as if I'd used an image I'd shot myself, as I did last year. Of course, the half-way point here is to create a blank canvas at exactly the same amount of pixels as a high-quality JPEG image, then layer a full-size image over the top, or else use multiple images to "build-up" an overall piece of work with many objects, layers and adjustments. I will do this now.I like some of the ideas that are coming up for me working this way.

Step-by Step

I am basically starting with two images of building sites my father has worked on: one with the man himself, the other with some random workers. 

I thought both of these would provide a good backdrop; work being the backbone of our family's life.

I placed these on a new plain white canvas, and started by reducing the opacity of both.

I opted against the image without my father present, for I thought it looked too much like a H&S advert. Here you can also see how I have bolstered the colours of the one that my dad is in by adding a Levels adjustment layer. For the other image I started "playing" with the Clone Tool to extend the ladder and other pieces of the image. I think this is where Photoshop comes into its own, allowing us to extend prominent parts of the piece in either a systematic or painterly fashion. When cloning too large an area, there is a risk of patternation, where the repetition of pixels is too evident. In this case I think this works in my favour, for it gives it a disjointed effect, reminding me of one of Hockney's montages

After getting rid of the other work image I converted it to monochrome using a black and white adjustment layer. . Using the white mask on the B&W adjustment layer, I selected a black brush at an opacity of 25% to slightly reveal the original colour of the ladder for added punch. I later added more colour to the walls and pieces of scaffolding, as I felt it was way too dark.

[At this point I noticed something that troubled me. I had been scanning the old images at 300dpi, but the canvas I was using was sized at 4288 x 2859 with a resolution of a meagre 28.3dpi, so when I zoomed to Actual Pixels my work appeared very poor quality. However, I quickly reconciled this by creating a new canvas of the same dimensions, but with a resolution of 300dpi, and copied the existing layers onto this. So at this point Photoshop and I are back on speaking terms. Onwards and upwards].

Now my father appears in colour. This is basically the same image as the one I used above, but I cut my father from it using the quick selection tool (refining the selection: smoothing and feathering and shifting the edge), then dragging and dropping it onto the main canvas. The coloured father is actually layered over the father of the original here, so as to make him stand out. I then added a Curves layer with a Clipping Mask to change the shade of his red coat.

I was really happy with this painterly effect at this stage; the way it seemed to be breeding and blossoming across the canvas of its own accord. I like this way of working: it seems natural and unforced. It just needed some colour at this point. This is when I introduced the sky.

I used a Hue and Saturation layer to bring out the blue in the sky. This pretty much provided the overall colour of the canvas from here-on in, for- using the eye-dropper tool and paint brush with low opacity- I painted the remainder of the lower right corner of the canvas.

Noticing that the white space of the cloud as a perfect opportunity to layer text over, I looked at some of the old hymn sheets I had scanned earlier (below). I wanted something that would pertain theme of personal tragedy in my family (the child that passed away), and how religion and the church is often used as a way of seeing people through these difficult times. My family were never big on religion, but the Methodist church was never that far away from both physically (we lived down the road) as part of weekly ritual. The text I used here was:

Blessings abound where'er he reigns;

The prisoner leaps to lose his chains;

The weary find eternal rest;

And all the sons of want are blessed

                     

The original hymn sheet alongside its application on the canvas. I used the Transform > Warp to fit it exactly into the main cloud. This was a new thing for me, for I usually just make do with the Free Transform.

And finally my main theme was becoming apparent: the ladder leading leading from my father's building site, passed the clouds and into heaven where my late brother resides. And with this we have the reference of "sons" from the lyric. Later you will see I have included my father's father. I think of the idea of "leaps to lose his chains" relating to my own emancipation from carrying the weight of this legacy on my shoulders and becoming my own man. I continued this with the inclusion of flowers taken from a mother's day card Mark himself sent to my mother, also layered into the clouds.

The mother's day card sent from Mark, my parent's first-born. Thought this was a nice touch, highlighting the theme of fathers and sons, not to mention the "sons" of the hymn. 

This is what I opted for in terms of the clouds in the end. I knew I wanted to relate it to Mark in some way (the delicacy of the flowers from his own mother's day card juxtaposed with the sense of industry from my father's building site. I did think of placing him in the clouds instead, but it seemed to detract from the use of text, which I knew needed to be read.

 

I used eight flowers in all. Obviously the card only contained five , which is why I had to reselect them every time I wanted to use it again. Notice how I apply a mask to each layer, for my modus operendi is to use the Eraser Tool to erase the remaining areas once I have fitted it into the cloud. The mask allows me to constantly switch between black and white when I make mistakes and/or erase a part I want to keep. Reducing the Opacity helps my see what I am doing. Each rose had an Opacity of 43%. I like consistency in my work.

After the addition of delicacy with the flowers, I decided it was time to extend the darkness of the left hand side where my father's building site was. Why? Because I liked this part and I wanted it to continue, rather than leave it to become a touch of brilliance in an otherwise mediocre montage: "play to one's strengths", I believe is the correct phrase. So I looked what I had in my vaults that I could "weave" into this segment, mindful not to either ruin the painterly effect or have too much going on (as is often the risk with this type of thing).

. 

So I added a picture of me when I must have been around 7yrs old, with my shirt off no less. I added it by the side of my dad (rather than directly beneath like I experimented with earlier), hovering above him like some spectre from the past/future.

My father was always a man's man (unlike me, who has always been interested in literature and the arts), hence the fact the first thing I did was to include him in his building sit environment. But he was also a child once (hard to believe, this), which makes him just as vulnerable as me at the same age. For this reason I found it too irresistable not to feature the picture below (which I had seen lying around their house for some time):

My dad (70 in November) dressed as a canary circa 1950 at a school fancy-dress.

Coming together now: note where I have slotted it into the area I had previously cloned, then erased the parts that didn't fit. Step-by-step I can make this work.

Then I found a picture of my mother slightly older than my canary father, and slotted this underneath it:

My mum circa 1958 aged twelve. Looks like Anne Frank. And her name is actually Ann.

Nice little addition for me. Slotted in there lovely. Curves layer with clipping mask so it gels with the canary.

I admit: I was skipping about all over the place whilst working on this. I now had my dad as a child with my mum as a child below him. I like this idea of coming together through the generations. They'd obviously not met when they were this age, but they can share the same canvas through the wonders of digital technology and Photoshop. After these were in place, I decided to return to the father and son theme. There were some decent pictures in my "vaults"  both my father and father's father looking like teddy-boys and gangsters respectively. So I thought of adding one of these to the mix:

My dad's dad and his friend, Joe.

Building it up.

Decided more colour was needed at this juncture. Mix of black and white and different hues is what makes it thus far in my opinion. That being said- as is the case with Opacity also- these things work best incementally as opposed to either full colour or mono. For this reason, I chose the next colour photo, converted it to B&W, before applying a mask and using a black brush again to reveal some of the colour:

I knew I was happy with what I had up to now (especially the building site layer I had started with and the way it seemed to develop organically across the canvas), but I knew I had to put something just as strong on the opposing side. The idea was to place something equally large here to fill the space, then see about stretching it upwards in the same way as the building site image.

Wasn't doing it for me, this. I just felt it was all a little too easy to use a picture that was this big just so it would fill the rest of the space. It's not about the easy option for me. If anything its about pulling one's hair out and suffering for one's art (to abuse a cliche).

So then I tried it with a piece of the building site image without my dad present.

Thought this looked a bit too harsh and industrial. I did want some softness to the piece after all.

At this point I looked at the hue of this part of the canvas and noted the blue of the sky I had cloned downwards earlier. I trawled through my scanned family images and noticed the perfect two images that could be used when trying to fill this space: two fun pics from completely different eras of my father and sister and mother respectively walking/lay on separate beaches at different points in the past.  Below is the first:

                                                          

                                             Father and Julia (my sister) at the beach during the mid-70s.

                                           

Note how I have tried my utmost to blend the sea of  the beach picture with my original blur sky. I did this in two steps, again using clipping masks: 1) added a Curves layer and- using the separate  R, G & B channels (mainly blue) tried to get the blue looking the same, and  2) added a Black and White Layer, then used a black brush with an Opacity of 25% to reveal the colour slightly.

Mum on the beach (pre-marriage)

Did pretty much the same to the picture of my mother, only- since the original image was B&W- I also added a Hue and Saturation layer to help get a colour like that of the other beach picture.

At this point I thought it time for something other than images, so decided to look through my files for some text I could add to the mix. Luckily for me, along with all the pictures I collected from my mother back on Mother's Day, were the original sleeves from the 70s/80s that the pictures came in. One is below:

This is the type of thing you used to get when you bought an image from Butlins or Pontins. I combined this with another image of my mother jokingly pretending to push a railway carriage to make it look as if she was pushing the lettering here.

Isle of Mann

Then I flipped the picture horizontally to make it look like she was pushing the other side too. I'm pretty sure there was a similar image of my father pushing it, but I couldn't find it when it counted.

At the same time as thinking of slotting this part in, I also found quite a prominent picture of my mother holding my new-born sister that I thought would look goo in the middle of the Snap Happy text, almost interrupting it.

See what I mean? You tend to get this is montage a lot. Gives a more random flavour; that not everything has to appear perfect and straight and planned.

In keeping with the holiday theme of beaches and pictures that were quite evidently posed for at the time, I found one of my father with my mother's sister in the doorway of a caravan, that seemed to slot in nicely below the "snap happy" text and to the right of my father as the canary, again creating a nice juxtaposition of the man at very different ages. Speaking of different ages, there was one of my dad with all his mates from 1963 that I thought looked a jovial image to include, but my father's inscription on the back was perhaps more interesting, if only because it afforded me another opportunity to layer more text.

Quite evidently posing for the camera.

Great image this. Talk about rights of passage. Out drunk with the lads friday/saturday night. I scanned the inscription on the back that I later used, but I couldn't find it when I needed it just now. It read: "All the boys at the Embassy 1963". It refers to Bernard Manning's Embassy Club on Rochdale Rd, Harpurhey, North Manchester, where my folks grew-up.

You won't see it at this size, but I have used Free Transform to layer the inscription across my father's preening chest, to encapsulate the air of masculinity that the two images represent.

As you can see, its coming together here now, but I felt it just needed a few extra motifs that I have professed to mention in my planning (e.g. the fact that all of my immediate were in the cubs/scouts/brownies/guides to some extent). I knew I had the photographic proof of this; it was just a matter of finding ones that would fit and where.

This was the one of my mother during her girl guide days. Obviously, Baden Powell had links to the Hitler Youth back then. Again, couldn't find the one of my sister.

At the top left, you can see my mother marching next to my sister , both dressed in their Brownie/Guides attire. My sister was actually holding yours truly here, but I used the Eraser tool to rub me out. I can see me any time.

At this point, I started to return to things I'd been playing with earlier on. There was a shot of my mother and Mark lovingly staring directly at one another, which I felt conveyed a further warmth to the piece. The layer had been there all along, but I took it out of the equation by clicking on the eye symbol on the left-hand side, for I didn't want to oversaturate the canvas with too many references to someone who had passed away. This picture is below.

Its a terrible composition really, but that's beside the point. It is these moments and these keepsakes that help my family remember the good times, and for that reason I was willing to include it.

I was keeping this shot as a kind of secret weapon to bring out when I needed it. I didn't like the idea of it providing the bulk of the canvas, which is why- after slotting stuff in in itself place- I was then able to reintroduce it and erase parts of it so it blended with the other stuff in this area

I think this point about questioning whether to bring something back in, or indeed what could just as easily stifle the whole process (and make it seem too overkill), brings me to the end. You will note that, to the right of this last picture I have just mentioned, is a considerable empty space. I think I was exhausted by this time, both physically, in the sense I could no longer step back from the thing and see it through fresh eyes, but also in the sense that I didn't really have any pictures left to play with. Below is the finished article:

Generally, I am happy with it. I specifically like the shade have blue which is primarily the result of cloning the sky layer down through the rest of the canvas, not to mention using the eye-dropper tool to select the same colour then painting the rest of the canvas.

The only reservation I have with the piece is that it could be argued it is just a series of pictures stuck together on a canvas. I mean you could say this about a lot of stuff, but I'm questioning whether the big ideas I had for the thing during the planning stage were somehow a little too big. Either this or my skills in Photoshop are not moving at the same rate as my ideas.

But at the end of the day I enjoyed  the process of finding materials and scanning them in to create something completely fresh and exciting. And it has brought a smile to the faces of certain family member, so I guess this is the main thing.

Montage: Family History: Ideas and Proposal

FAMILY HISTORY is to be my theme. This post is to be read in conjunction with the one entitled Montage: Early Stages and Planning. I will deal with the conceptual/theme here, and the technical in the other post. As is often the case, there will be some overlap in places.

Background (or: why?)

The work I have done so far has encompassed different parts of British working life (car boots, Broughton House, Launderettes, my street photographs). Tapping into this, I am also interested in family life, especially as I feel its effects nearly every day of my life. I have suffered from Anxiety and Depression all of my adult life, which has meant I have looked into many different theories as to its genesis. Some have been futile, but others have added a richness to how I come to understand my upbringing and the characters involved. The word 'characters' itself is important here, for I am interested in the narrative of people's lives, and how these can be represented in literature and the visual arts. I was only thinking the other day about how the death of Margaret Thatcher and the retirement of Alex Ferguson seem to represent an ending of something that has been a part of the backdrop to my own life in one way or another, albeit on the outskirts of day-to-day life itself.

As with most families, things have happened within mine over the last few years that have been painful, and in many respects they have happened within quick succession, allowing very little time to take stock and process. As is the British way, such things are not openly discussed in any great detail, choosing instead to "just get on with it" and do what has to be done. So I suppose the montage I will create is my way of expressing and interpreting the way I feel about my family. I think the art of photo montage is such a suitable way of carrying out this task, especially in the age of Photoshop, where layers can be used to represent the layers of memory in one's life and family history.

The Process/themes

On Mother's Day a few months ago, I urged my lovely mother to get some old pictures out so I could have a look at them and see what I could make of them in a piece of art. There were a lot of them. Crikey. All from different eras and epochs- containing a whole host of different characters- sadly a lot now deceased. It was also interesting to see the different types and negative, media and formats used over the years. It would be an interesting piece of research to find out exactly what film (even camera) was used to shoot my parents' wedding for instance.

Whilst looking through all these gems from the past, I noticed certain themes developing in my head: key relationships between family members, shared interests etc. For instance I noticed how all of my immediately family have been involved with the scouting movement in some time in their childhood/adolescence, so this made me think of how I could link these in visual form.

Father and son relationships will be of paramount importance in the creative process. I have always marvelled at the way this topic is representing in the arts as one of difficulty, expectation and poor communication. I feel I can explore this in my montage due to the fact I have pictures of my and my father from my childhood, as well as those of his father too.

Following on from these relationships, work was something that was always stressed as being important in our family, and it is interesting looking back (now both my parents are retired) at the part this played in their lives and the people they were as a result. I find it difficult to detach my father from the hard-working scaffolder he was: the feelings I felt as he arrived home from work every day- eating his tea with a pint of Stonehouse cider, off the old green tray that once belonged to my maternal grandmother. I wrote a poem in 2010 about my father's inability to switch-off from work and the damage I felt it had caused me. It might be an idea to dig this out of my creative writing file and layer the original over a scene of  my father working. I find the written word in montage even more appealing than that of the typed word.

There are also some deeper- somewhat darker- issues that I am going to tackle here. I have a picture of my late brother who sadly passed away a ten years before I was born. I see this as a fundamental and inescapable part of my family history, making up part of my own legacy. I often wonder about the effects this has had on the two people that would later bring me into the world: would they have been different had their first-born lived? I think art is a perfect place to explore some of these unanswered questions of one's past (or one's parents' past).

I aim to use the tools available to me in Photoshop to fill in these blanks, so to speak. I like the fact that I will start with a blank canvas, and use these snapshots from decades ago, to ultimately "build-up" and create a new image that I can look at for years to come. After all, what is art if not a means of rewriting what is? And what is photography if not to see things in different ways?

Montage: Suck it and See

This is a continuation of the Early Stages & Planning post. In that post I discussed some of the key things to be mindful of before beginning a project like this, such as resolution, image quality ways of scanning and preparing an image for work inclusion in a piece. Here- as the title suggests- I will pretty much be "journalling" the things I put into practice as I go along and commenting what I feel works, what I feel doesn't, and how things can be improved. Here goes!

This is a little test to get me into it. As you can see, I have layered 3 other JPEG images over the original: the passport cover that I have fitted onto my mother's skirt, reducing the opacity and erasing the excess; the "United Kingdom" part of my passport onto my fathers arm, and a baby picture of myself layered onto his face. For all of these I have used a Curves layer with a Clipping Mask. This was especially important for the baby picture, for I wanted it to fully resemble the tones of the original picture. If there's something to take from this early effort, its that it reminds me of an old punk album cover (The Sex Pistols), and how the movement often relied upon the reappropriation of the past (more on this below).

Another simple manipulation here. I have merely boosted the colour with a Levels layer, then layered the crest from the front of the passport over my face, before adjusting this to the appropriate hue with a Curves layer with a Clipping Mask attached (RGB). Again this reminds me of the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen cover.

Jamie Reid's album artwork made from paper cut outs in the style of a ransom note  (1)

In the next post I aim to start my montage proper, using a fresh canvas.

  

Montage: Early Stages and Planning

I think the first thing I knew I had to consider was what resolution I was going to scan at. I had a quick read of the booklet given to us by David Gee (tutor and Photoshop extraordinaire), but decided that- since I had already made a pretty good job of some collages last year (see previous post)- I didn't really need to know all that was detailed. I really just wanted to get on with the scanning and messing around (experimenting in Photoshop). I think a project like this is more about having fun than understanding the technical side. That being said, the first thing I did was to scan an old photo of my parents twice (one at 300dpi and one at 600dpi) to give me an idea of the the pros and cons of each one. I did this because the 300dpi didn't look too clever on screen when I first opened it. However, the 600dpi one looked even worse, possibly because (using Dave's notes) "the image resolution [was] set at a value near or above the printer's [HP Photosmart C470] resolution". Below is an image of my mother and father "back in the day" scanned at different resolutions.

Scanned at 300dpi

scanned at 75dpi (for some reason my scanner doesn't have a 72). Note how faded it looks compared with the one scanned at 300dpi.

It is also important to know whether an image will work best scanned as colour, greyscale or black and white. Before looking into this, I foolishly thought B&W would be similar to greyscale, but apparently not. Black and White does exactly what it says on the tin, whereas greyscale contains all the tones in between the two: "all artwork falls into two basic categories -- black-and-white line art and continuous-tone images"  (1). Grayscale falls into the second bracket. Below is an image (again of my mother and father in their halcyon days) scanned using greyscale, black and white and colour.

Colour pays heed to the subtleties of the image, representing the true feel of the photograph. Any changes can then be made in Photoshop. I plan n scanning everything as a colour image.

Greyscale looks faded by comparison.

Black and White just renders the photo unworkable. It is akin to the Hard Mix blend mode of layers in Photoshop (below).

Hard Mix blend of the greyscale image

Hard Mix blend of the colour version.

The next step was to follow the tutorial on "touching-up" that was presented to us by Dave at a later date. This is basically the kind of stuff you see advertised in the shop windows of photographers and printers ["we restore old photographs here" etc.]. I don't think I will retouch all the photos I use in my piece (I want some to retain their authenticity of the time), but below is a retouching of the first image I showed. I've also added a Levels layer, darkening both the blacks and midtones for extra "punch".

Note how I have completely removed the wear to the right of the image. And looks so much better once I played with the levels.

Additional to these photos from yesteryear, I knew from my collage/montage last year that text works really well because key words from the text can be associated with certain images. It was just as well- whilst rummaging through my family's old archives- I also stumbled across an old hymn sheet and other typed sheets. Here I plan to enlarge the text in Photoshop by cropping, and layering over an image. This will then allow me to alter the opacity, fill and blend modes. As you can imagine, most of these documents are stained and/or have been written on by either myself as a child or another child in our family at the time. This makes them perfect for use as textures, much like the session dedicated to transforming portraits into composite images.

The printed word works very well in the montage, as certain words can be linked to relevant images.

The idea of the printed word used to strengthen the images used in a my montage gave me another idea: I could scan my passport (now expired) to create the theme of identity, which links inextricably with family. I already have countless amounts of pictures of me at various stages of my life, so I could use these (memories) to link with the more impersonal document of the passport, with its expressionless smile. The burgundy cover of the passport itself could also be used as a texture, or else merged with the main part.

Montage for me is not just about images, but also typeface: there's no mistaking the strict, regimental font of the passport, made more so when juxtaposed with memories from the past.
The text looks faded here, but with a Levels layer, this can soon be made more bold and workable.

Old, worn, tatty, the outside jacket of the passport might make a good texture, or at least blended something at some point.

Just as I considered the ways text can be linked to images, I think I also need to consider the colours I use when constructing a piece of work such as this. To say Photoshop has a lot of potential would be understatement of the year, and it is very much the more sophisticated relative of an artist's palette. An artist wouldn't combine colours that didn't go together whilst painting a masterpiece, and it is no different when using a digital program such as Photoshop. I have been looking at the types of colours involved in some of the old photos I have, so now I need to find ways of keeping things within the same colour gamut. I have a found a good way of doing this is to create a Curves adjustment layer with a Clipping Mask attached, so that I can then adjust the Red, Green and Blue curves separately. The clipping mask only effects the layer below, which in this case would be a new image layered over the original/main image.

I think at this stage I pretty much have a footing on what I aim to do. From here-on in, it will pretty much be a case of "suck it and see". I will be trying things and posting the various stages on here just to keep a breast of things, whether they work or not (and why).

1) http://www.creativepro.com/article/scanning-101-setting-the-right-resolution