The first step with the school picture is to look at it and see what the problems are. Most obvious is the faded section on the left side. Considering its location cropping will most like be the way to go here. Next look at the area around the door. There is a faint circular area that appears lighter than the surrounding image. The first clue is the left center fence post is lighter than the right center for no obvious reason. Next the shadowed clapboard to the left of the door doesn’t as dark as that to the right. Quite possibly we’re looking at the result of burning the print to bring out detail. Another interesting detail is that there appears to be a halo between the ridge line and the sky and the roof and the sky. This will have to be removed. The hillside to the right is very dark and a little burning should bring out more detail. Not too much since it is in shadow. Examination at increased magnification, 300% or 400% shows there to be very few spots or specks that need repairing. Finally, since I’m looking at using this for decoration vice historical examination I’ll remove the overhead lines. Their existance in what is essentially a “back of the beyond” part of Oregon in 1939 is historically significant and they should otherwise be left in.
I’ll begin with the usual steps of changing the mode from grayscale to RGB, cropping the image and using the auto color feature.
Using the dodge tool at about 200px two clicks takes care of the area around the door. The burn tool at 100px once over the hillside makes the correction there. In both of these instances a little correction is all it takes.
The halo effect, the wires and the few specks are removed using a combination of the stamp and repair tools. As a last step I tweek the levels to arrive at this image.
The last step is to use the paint brush to hand color the image.
