Do you remember using a microfilm reader? If so, did you ever use yellow transparency film to help make the images legible? I carried a sheet of that film in my genealogy bag and found it very valuable when images of census or other records were very faint.
As I was looking at an image of a Missouri marriage record on my computer, I was wishing for the ability to use the ‘yellow film’ with a digital image.
Since I don’t have a ‘yellow sheet’ of film, I tried a different approach. I took a screen shot of the area that I thought was the CRAWFORD marriage record.
I then opened the screen shot in my paint program, Jasc PaintShop Pro. This is a more economical program than Adobe’s Photoshop. While I could have spent hours playing with the various settings to see what would help enhance the photo, I opted for the ‘Auto-Level’ option. That brought out the writing enough that I can read most of it.
Out of curiosity, I uploaded my screenshot to MyHeritage to see how it would handle this blurry original. After colorization and enhancing, I was able to download an image similar to my PaintShop pro image.
While still a little hard to read, either enhanced version is definitely more legible than the original. Now I know that I can use the My Heritage photo tool for more than family photos!
Great idea!
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I do this using Microsoft’s Photos app – there are a lot of editing tools that do help with clarifying an image… It can be finicky, but it’s worth the time.
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