You might wonder why go through all the trouble of trying to preserve old photographs? Unless they happen to be pictures of your direct ancestors, why bother?
Well there are many good reasons. Many of these pictures are just plain beautiful. Others are of historic interest. All of them preserve information about some unique time and place that can never be exactly the same again.
Old photographs can be educational — witness their use in documentary films, such as those by Ken Burns about baseball, or the Civil War. They can be inspiring and evocative, or may engender sympathy or disgust. Viewing them enlightens and enriches our lives.
It is also possible, even easy with today’s technology, to transform old images into new works of art. Now I’m no artist, but even I can manipulate images in ways that make them more interesting, or useful for advertising or illustration. And public domain images allow me to make those kinds of derivative works without infringing on anyone’s copyrights.
Take the following image of the city of Cork, for example. I spent about an hour total making all the variations shown below — I could have spent that long on a single image if I were planning to publish it and wanted it ‘just-right’ — but even so, these are just quick edits with Photoshop.
Here is the original image, published around 1900:
Patrick Bridge in Cork
Even just changing the brightness, contrast, hue and saturation can lead to a variety of different looking versions:
Simple Setting Variations
Then the built-in filters Photoshop supplies can be used to make other interesting versions:
Using Built-In Filters
Or one may choose the slightly more time-consuming method of combining different modifications and colors in different layers, to create special effects or colorization:
Using Mixed Techniques
And I am not even an expert at Photoshop — I don’t know what half the tools and filters can do. Of course Photoshop is just the program I happen to use, there are many others out there that can create similar effects — little or no skill required.
All these from this one original image — imagine the possibilities from the millions of public domain images available!
This is my favorite -- which do you like best?