Ridge

This is a friend's grandfather; a Serbian pilot photographed around the 1920s. It's the first archival retouch I've done so I'm putting this up not really as an example of how to do it, but just to say, well, I did it this way.

Here are the steps:

1. Right-click the original jpg in Adobe Bridge and open in Camera Raw (ACR). Convert to DNG using the Save-As dialogue, and reopen to adjust basic exposure, clarity and white balance.

2. Open the image into Photoshop and clone out the blemishes using the patch, healing and clone tools.

3. Use the pen tool to isolate different areas of the image, select and feather the path before applying a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

While retouching the image, I noticed a strange white block down the pilot's left side. I thought it was something regimental (a sword?!) until my wife Chino said, "That background's fake though, isn't it?", which I hadn't even considered, but the more I look at it, the more it does seem that he is standing in front of a picture. Photomontage, even then!