Photo restoration and colour

In 1956 my Grandmother (left) and her sister were married on the same day in Wallsend. Almost 60 years later, I restored and coloured this photo to show her at a family reunion. She's 85 years old.

After posting this video to r/Colorization, someone (quite-rightly) pointed out that I could have saved myself a lot of time, by flood-filling large areas, then using that saved time to colour a lot of individual items differently (like the different leaves and petals).

Still, I think the global effects at the end save it.

Grandma Wedding

Wedding poster, better than a toaster

I took along the DSLR to my cousin's wedding in Jamaica during the summer and managed to get some really natural shots of the bride and groom (largely by getting in the way of the official photographer - tsk tsk). Once home, I blended these photos over a lovely texture, along with a shot of their wedding venue that I took from the hotel balcony.

The part that took the longest? Coming up with the bl**dy strapline for the poster.

Another Video Timelapse

Sometimes I'll be asked by a sales person to produce concept artwork for a website design, in order for them to win a pitch. Mockups like these are always good fun, because you can be as creative as you like, without brand constrictions or having to worry about image rites (as the artwork isn't guaranteed to be used).

The fun ends if you actually win the business. Because that beautiful mockup you created probably contains images from Google, which you now can't use, and you'll never find one as good on istockphoto, or without shooting.

The video below is a screencast of a mockup I created for a potential campaign with the video game Destiny (which looks awesome by the way). We didn't win the business, but I had a lot of fun creating this page. It was originally going to be a content hub, using the planet in the centre as a navigation tool to get to article content. And it's a stark improvement (skills-wise) on a video timelapse I made a year ago.

Restoring my Grandma's photo in Photoshop

Like most web designers, I barely use photoshop for its intended purpose. It's obviously a very powerful photo manipulation tool, which happens to have an added bonus of having everything you need to create designs for beautiful web sites and apps. Arguably though, its real power lies in the transformation of raw camera footage, into pretty much anything you want.

Photoshop retouching is a pretty controversial issue at the moment. Campaigns for showcasing 'real', untouched images of women in magazines are rife. But you really do have to admire the skill of these artists (and they are artists). The ability to spot artefacts and unsettling quirks with an image that you barely notice until they have been edited or removed, is a true skill.

A few months ago I watched this amazing video of a time-lapsed colorisation and restoration of an old photo and I've been desperate to give it a go ever since. My wonderful grandmother turned 84 this month, so I asked my mam to scan over a picture of her and the late Geordie legend that is my granddad Ted. All with the aim of bringing this photo from 1954 to life with some colour.

This is the original.

The scan isn't amazing and the resolution is unfortunately quite low (1074x1692). The first step was to remove all colour from the image (including the RGB horizontal aliasing that the scan included) and use the curves tool to bring out the highlights and shadows.

step1

Then I cleaned the dust and scratches with the spot healing and clone stamp tool, including the frayed and cracked corners/borders.

Now with a clean, black and white image as a good starting point, I began to add colour. Starting with the railings. I used a clear layer, with an overlay blend mode and a hue/saturation adjustment layer. I could then paint over the image in sections, allowing me to edit the colour easily afterwards.

Choosing colours was difficult. I found my self Googling phrases like "1950s stairwell railing" to try and find an appropriate palette. But the floral and wave section of the rail is clearly lighter than the bars. I then added the walls and carpet.

Then I added grandma's dress. Again, picking a colour wasn't easy, but the shade of grey was dark enough to be either green, purple or a blue. I chose a purple, as this was the most complimentary against the green railing.

I started with granddad's (makeup-free) skin as I thought this would be the easiest. He was an outdoorsy type, and clearly more tanned than my grandma. The hardest part here was his lips, and I kept giving him lipstick! It took endless toying to pick the right shade. I also polished his scuffed shoes.

Grandma's skin tone and hair was, without a doubt, the hardest part of the whole image. I'm still not certain I've got it quite right. The flash on the camera was clearly quite harsh, and with grandma in the foreground, she absorbed most of the light here. The fine detail on her jewellery was also difficult.

With the colouring done, I finished up with some global effects, including a faint noise layer, a curves layer (to pop the new colours) and then increased the saturation right at the end, which I'm sure you'll agree, rounds the whole image off really nicely.

Here's the final version in stages.

Amateur Photography

So my Christmas present to myself this year was a Canon 550D camera, with a little prime lens. I'm not quite sure what I hope to achieve with it, but I can never expect to master my field as a visual designer, without understanding the basics of photography. With that in mind, I bought this ebook (iPad app) and started reading.

I took my camera to the river in Surbiton near me and grabbed some snaps while a small child was scaring the hell out of some seagulls. I've had some great results really quickly. The little prime lens has a wide aperture so the depth of field is awesome. But I'm gonna have to come up with some new techniques, as I can't get away with simple blurry background shots for ever.

An A-POLO-gy from Nestlé

In August 2013 I wrote a letter to Nestlé. A week later I found myself on the home page of the Daily Mail, and in articles across The Sun, Huffington Post and Yahoo News. It's my first (and probably only) experience of going viral, but what's interesting is how the story spread and the reaction it received. Here's a bit of background:

In 1996, in a village called Scamblesby, Lincolnshire, I found a green Polo mint in Nestlé's Find the Golden Polo competition worth £10. I sent the Polo off and then forgot about it for 17 years. When I saw a small boy eating a green sweet on the way to work, the whole experience came flooding back, and I wrote an open letter to Nestlé, explaining that I never received my £10.

I posted said letter to the social news site Reddit, remarking on how Nestlé robbed me of a chain of countless childhood experiences that could have led to careers worth tens of millions of pounds. The letter got a bit of traction (around 40,000 views), but when Nestlé replied with a cheque for £10, a cheeky letter of apology and a whole box of Polos, the internet went a bit mental.

The reply received 300,000 views in one day on Reddit, the Huffington Post and Yahoo News then picked the story up, which was then caught, weirdly, by the Lincolnshire Echo (they must have had search alerts trawling the net for the keyword 'Lincolnshire'), who asked me for a picture and then seeded the story to the UK nationals. When it hit the Daily Mail, The Metro and The Sun, my phone was ringing for an interview with ITV.

It was all quite exciting and funny, until I spotted this comment on the Daily Mail website:

Would this be the same James Barnard who says on his website "My job for the last 4 years has been to design (and in some cases build) creative online content for top brands." Has James done work for Bauer Media? Has Bauer Media worked with Nestle? Is this all a coincidence? It may well be; the story may be absolutely true. But the moment you know someone works in the marketing/advertising industry, you can't help those little niggles of doubt. - Chris__M, Peterborough

Then I started to panic a little bit. In my letter to Nestlé I had casually referred to FHM magazine, citing it as one of the distractions I'd faced as a boy that caused me to forget about the competition. Then I recalled a few comments from users on Reddit:

The fact that you took the time to put the accent on the 'e' shows that you most likely work for them.

F*ck you man. You blatantly work for Nestlé.

The fact that the "customer" puts an image of a green polo in the background is enough to suggest it is [PR]. Who the hell would add that to a letter of something they just thought of "this morning"?"

So now I'd been exposed as a Bauer employee and was being accused of spinning a PR campaign for Nestlé! I turned down the TV interview, as I was terrified of saying something silly, and quite frankly, felt a bit stupid for posting this letter so openly. What had started as a bit of fun, could have potentially turned into a PR nightmare.

Luckily it all died down as quickly as it escalated, and my 5 minutes of fame is now well and truly over. The speed at which this whole thing peaked and troughed was staggering. But for someone who works in digital, this was a pretty enlightening experience. Everyone in advertising is looking for that campaign that goes viral; for that one piece of content that takes off in an exponential way. But while exposure is always a good thing, you can bloody-well guarantee that the trolls are always lurking.

Here's a transcript of my letter:

Dear Nestlé,

When I was 11-years-old, back in 1996, one of the highlights of my week was visiting my local sweet shop in Scamblesby, Lincolnshire. Scamblesby is an incredibly small, almost hamlet-esque, village. It has a small school, a few farms, a church and even a pub, which I used to live in.

As you can imagine, finding entertainment in a village this small was monumentally difficult. The battery pack on my Gameboy had melted to a cinder, I'd completed Bart Simpson vs The Space Mutants on my Nintendo and I was so good at pool from living in a pub that I was representing our pub in county competitions.

The owner of the local sweet shop in Scamblesby was a grumpy old, border-line alcoholic, Frenchman named George. One of my favourite antics was to visit the sweet shop early on a Sunday with an obscure amount of money like £1.78, and order 178 assorted penny sweets. Cola bottles, pink shrimps, white chocolate mice, that sort of thing. As he was counting out the sweets, my brother and I would do that old trick of shouting out random numbers to put him off. Not very funny, I'm sure you'll agree, but to my brother and I, watching a hungover Frenchman shakily dropping sweets into a paper bag, lose count and swear "Merde!" at us was funnier than anything on TV.

Obviously, the joke ran its course, and my mother stepped in (our livelihood largely depended on George drinking at our pub). So it was off-the-shelf sweets for my brother and I from now on. One day I bought a packet of Polo mints, namely because the horses in the fields by our pub loved them.

I'm sure you'll remember that in 1996, Nestlé ran a contest called 'The Golden Polo'. If you found a golden Polo in your packet of Polos, you had won £1,000! I'm also sure you'll remember the story of the owner of a racehorse accidentally feeding said horse a £1,000 Polo, as he had assumed that the Polo had just gathered fluff in his pocket!

Well that day I found a coloured Polo in my packet. It wasn't gold, it wasn't red (worth £100), but it was green. I showed what I thought was a mouldy Polo to my mum, who joyously informed me that I had won £10! Can you imagine what £10 is like to an 11-year-old boy? This meant a new battery pack for my Gameboy, or at least 2 hours of George time. I didn't eat it (although I admit I did lick it to find out what a green Polo tastes like), but I read the instructions and duly posted it off to Nestlé to claim my reward.

I started Grammar school that year. I discovered FHM magazine, I learned the drums, I met girls, I learned enough French to understand George's potty mouth. And I completely forgot about my green-tenner Polo. Right up until this morning, when I was walking to work and saw a kid in a pram tentatively lick a green sweet, knowing full-well in his tiny heart that nothing green tastes good. And I realised that in the 17 years since I found it, I never received a single penny for that Polo.

Do you know what a tenner in 1996 is worth these days? £15.90, but that's not the point. Ten pounds of entertainment to an 11-year-old boy is utterly priceless. You robbed me of a chain of countless childhood experiences, that ultimately could have led to a successful career in French film, or seen me develop the Mario franchise to global domination. Careers worth tens of millions of pounds.

Instead you left me with a subconscious feeling of loss; a void in my life, like the void in the centre of your sweet.

I write to you today, openly, to make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen to anyone else. To make you better understand your responsibility to children, and in turn, the world. You are not just fashioning sweets, you are fashioning a child's development, you are shaping memories and therefore ultimately influencing potential world leaders. You are shaping the future.

Don't forget that.

Yours faithfully,

James Barnard

P.S. I WANT MY BLOODY £10!

Coverage:
Daily Mail - Polo mint makers finally pay £10 to schoolboy who found prize sweet in pack 17 YEARS ago
The Sun - Schoolboy is minted 17 years late…
Huffington Post - James Barnard, Nestlé Contest Winner, Receives Prize 17 Years Late (PHOTOS)
Buzzfeed - 13 Spectacular Complaint Letters (no.10)
Yahoo - Man’s disgruntled letter to Nestlé gets sweet reply
The Drum - Nestle apologises for ‘hole-ly unacceptable’ 17 year Polo mint prize delay
Kingston Guardian - Minted: Man receives Polo prize 17 years after finding promotional green sweet
The Lincolnshire Echo - Man receives prize for finding special Polo – 17 years late
York Press - James waits w-hole long time for polo mint prize