Vivid Pix Restore brings to life a 1966 Jamaican Christmas

Vivid Pix Restore brings to life a 1966 Jamaican Christmas
By Bob Allebone, President, Southeast and Winnipeg Branch, MGS

 

 

Recently I was paging through a few scrapbooks of old photos I had inherited from a cousin.

As I had expected, I did not recognize many people in the photos since this cousin and I had lived quite far apart and did not see each other very often. And as is often the case with most old photos, the former owner of the photos had not written anything on the back to indicate dates or names.

But then I came upon a real gem. It was a photo of my aunt Hilda Allebone and a former British Army officer, Douglas Brock whom she had married. It was a second marriage for both of them and they settled down in his home in Jamaica. Where they met, I don’t have a clue since she and her two sisters and one brother, my father, grew up in Montreal

The photo is I expect of their first Christmas together in Jamaica, probably in 1966. It is interesting from our Manitoba perspective since the windows are wide open and there are no bug screens in the windows. They are both sitting on the floor of their home beside their tiny Christmas evergreen tree which no doubt was imported from the USA.

This photo find, is a real gem to me, because it is the only photo I have of them together. Beside it in the collection, I found a photo no doubt of the bushes with blossoms on the lane beside their house.

One problem. They are old colour photos and are badly faded as you will see below.

How shall we bring them back to life and provide me a better glimpse of my aunt and uncle and their surroundings? Well … use our Vivid-Pix Restore software of course, which is loaded on five of the computers in our MGS Resource Library.

I used my own scanner, a Canon Canoscan 9000F, to scan both photos at 800 dpi (dots per inch) and saved it as a tiff (or tif) file. Vivid-Pix likes to work with high resolution scans and large files with lots of digital data. So, scan at a setting if possible somewhere between 600 dpi and 1,800 dpi and save as a tiff (or tif) file if possible. However, Vivid-Pix can work with any image file such as a jpg file, but NOT a pdf. I could have used instead our new Epson V600 scanner which is in our MGS Resource Library and is designed especially to scan photos. This same scanner is used by the public libraries in Toronto. By the way, our Southwest Branch in Brandon also has an Epson V600 scanner and the Vivid-Pix Restore software.

Farther below are the results of the restoration.

As an MGS member you can use the Epson V600 scanner and the Vivid-Pix restore software for free and you can bring in as many photo scans as you desire. If you wish to use the V600 scanner, please bring along a flash drive to save your scans to or purchase one from us for $10. Easy to use written instructions are provided in the MGS Resource Library for the scanner and the photo restoration software.

You too can experience the same result of bringing faded memories back to life for your satisfaction and the benefit of your children and grandchildren. Don’t leave a legacy of faded memories on paper photos and that don’t indicate date, place and names. Restore the ones that have the most sentimental value.