Working with old photos

These are photos I took in 2003, before I became a blogger. Some of them are images I've never posted before, I believe.

Here's what a full view of the image I posted yesterday, in which I had tried to reduce the blue tones, because often photos taken with digital cameras are too blue. I think I might have gone too far toward the gray.

The windows on either side of the central panel are modern. The old windows they replaced didn't survive either the wars of religion, the French revolution, or the 19th-century restorers.

Then I found this photo. It's the bottom panels of the same window. It looked so dark that I thought it might be a candidate for the recycle bin. But I worked on it anyway. It actually looked much darker on my computer and in Photoshop than it does here. Who knows why?

Between blogging and working in the kitchen in the early morning — yesterday I ran 650 grams of meat through the grinder to make hamburger patties — and working in the yard later in the morning, when the temperature rises a little — it's hard to believe we are having chilly mornings now, after last weeks extreme heat — yesterday I emptied out the greenhouse and them pulled a lot of ivy, which was threatening to take over — I process photos.

Here's the result of processing the photo above. Processing means working in Photoshop. I just use Photoshop Elements, the amateur or home version of the application. And it's a really old version of the product.

So it turned out to be really easy to get something worthwhile out of this photo ratée.

This tall stained-glass panel is one of two Renaissance-era windows in the Montrésor church that have survived for nearly 500 years. I'm currently looking for photos of the second one. I've visited Montrésor a dozen or more times over the years, and I've taken photos in the church and around the town many times. I must have a photo of the other window somewhere.