I learned a new graphics trick!

A short story about some pictures.  Well, one picture in particular. 

B.'s office party turned out to have a 1920's theme.  I attempted to find an ultra-authentic drop waist until I encountered an awesome red dress.  It had a drape neckline, a plunging drape in the back, and a fishtail.  It was perfect for any time period from the 20's to the 50's.  I found it at Ross for about $30.  I was very skeptical at first, because I'd never worn a dress with no back, but when I tried it on, I was amazed.  I looked awesome in it and was determined to get a good photo of us.  (B. always looks awesome in his tux.)

Fortunately there was a photographer at the party.  Unfortunately she was following the '20's theme and giving everybody black and white photos.  We BEGGED her to print ours in color, because bam, red dress.  She graciously complied.  

Unfortunately, my old scanner gave me some issues when I scanned the hard copy handed to us the night of the party.  The colors came out weird, and no matter how much I tried, I could NOT get the fuzzies off the screen.

 . . . Am I glowing?

I decided to wait until the digital copies became available.  When they did, well, this is what we got.

You OK?  You're looking a little grey.

Nice, yes, but it just loses a lot without the red.  We tried to get color copies again, but they wanted to charge us more per picture.  What to do?  I'll color it myself!   Naturally I turned to the Internet for help, and eventually got results.

Aren't we awesome?

I admit it's not completely accurate, but I think it looks pretty good.  I may do some more touching up sometime - for instance, B's lips should be a bit pinker, and his watch chain and buttons should be gold.

You want to know how I accomplished this, don't you?  I lost my copy of Photoshop, so I've been struggling with Gimp.  It's a bit of a learning curve, but eventually I just learned to search online for my specific question.  I found two good tutorials.  The first one turned out not to work for me, because whenever I attempted to perform the 'invert the colors' step, Gimp just turned my image blank. Perhaps it might work normally for you.  I couldn't figure out the problem, so I found another tutorial, which basically uses layers and the multiply tool.  I also found the colorize tool to work pretty well, especially for skin.  It seemed to add a kind of subtle glow.  It was certainly very simple to perform, but it took me hours to do due to trying to get in all the cracks and crevices and clean up all the sharp lines.  Fortunately we were wearing red, white, and black!  I only needed three or four layers.  

I did two of the best pictures and called it good.  I still wish I had gotten a photo of the back of the dress.  I think this counts as my Red Dress.  I always envisioned something poofier.  Don't know about the Red Dress project?  Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess, wrote on her site:

"I want, just once, to wear a bright red, strapless ball gown with no apologies.  I want to be shocking, and vivid and wear a dress as intensely amazing as the person I so want to be.  And the more I thought about it the more I realized how often we deny ourselves that red dress and all the other capricious, ridiculous, overindulgent and silly things that we desperately want but never let ourselves have because they are simply “not sensible”.  Things like flying lessons, and ballet shoes, and breaking into spontaneous song, and building a train set, and crawling onto the roof just to see the stars better.  Things like cartwheels and learning how to box and painting encouraging words on your body to remind yourself that you’re worth it."

I'm not sure what made me feel more positive about myself: looking awesome in a dress I wouldn't normally dare wear, or being able to turn a black and white photograph into color.  I hope to wear the dress a lot more, and hopefully others like it.