It takes a community ...

 Members of the Silk clan.  Left:  original image    Right:  image after Photoshop

There are many people that I owe for who I am today.  If it were not for the kindness of those families and individuals I have great angst over what may have become of me.  I do not say this lightly; members of the Silk family (above) and the Schietzsch family helped me through tumultuous years.  I am forever in their debt.

As I was perusing Facebook I came across an all-too-familiar image from my past.  It rekindled memories of the love I was shown by strangers who took me in as one of their own.  Apart from the sentiments aroused by the image, I also noticed that there were a number of deficits in it that I could improve on.  So, I took some time from my day and did just that.

The first thing was to crop and straighten the image; I used Photoshop's cropping tool to do this.  Then there was the colour problem; notice the sheers are off-coloured on the left and corrected on the right.  Altering this also improved skin tones.  I used Photoshop's auto-colour feature to correct this.  Then came the problem with Richard's (far left) right shoulder.  The straightening caused a large white sliver to appear.  I copied, pasted, and flipped his left shoulder as a template for his right.  I then used Photoshop's clone tool to fill in the missing arm, sleeve, and shoulder parts.  I used the same tool to fill in the background by cloning the boards from other areas in the photo.

I took time to despeckle the image, enlarge it using the program's interpolation Image Size panel, and sharpened the features.  The overall effect was improved as is shown on the right side of the above image.

Thank's again to all those that made a difference in my life.  I would like to think that, in some way, I have made a difference in theirs as well.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com

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