Book Design: The Blinkers and the Bolgers by Jimmy Cinnamon & Frank Nagorka

 I recently was given the job to design a children's book from original illustrations drawn by the authors when they were about 10 years old. I was given a PDF of an earlier version that have been printed at a copy store and spiral bound. It had also been modified by someone else earlier with photoshop, adding some colour to the backgrounds. As it was drawn on letter sized paper and the printing of book on Amazon did not provide that format, all the illustration ad to be cleaned up and reformatted to fit a square page. 

To accomplish a clean professional look, I had to separate the original illustrations from the background, paper and added photoshop elements, including the hand written text. I used quite a few techniques to do this which takes some time, but it was worth since I could then reposition all the elements to fit on the square pages. I was asked to punch up the colours  as well since the copy store version had dulled the crayon colours. 

Another challenge was that some of the drawings went off the edge of the page so I had to extend and add to them so they would look complete on the page. 

The book can be bought on Amazon. 

Restoring BigMa

BigMa was what we called my mother's mother while she was alive. I made a documentary about her many years ago.

Recently my mother found and old photo of her she wanted me to restore and print for her. Oddly I had a copy of this photo already, but it was a scan of a photo copy I used in the title credits of the film so when I had the chance to work from a much higher resolution scan of it I was really happy to do it. 

For years I worked with PBS on a few American Experience episodes (won 2 Emmys and a Peabody Award on those projects yet somehow haven't had any more work from them in years) restoring and animating images and I LOVED doing it. This little thing for my mom made me realize how much I love to bring back old photos to their former glory. 

I could have taken this even further but there is a point where only I will ever see the work I did in the restoration. I have a very precise series of steps I do when restoring something. I start fixing the largest problems first which are usually tears and missing body parts. If I have access to other photos from the same period of the same person, I can usually replace a hand or arm or eye, there are limits of course. I will then clean up the dust and stains, by hand. If there are big black sections with dust and scratches I might selects only the black and run a dust an scratches filter to save time, but only in areas of solid black. 

Lastly I will convert it to black and white (if the photo was in B&W to begin with of course) and then add back in the sepia tone if the client wants it. 

expanding on some techniques

In my work, I often have to retouch photos for video and sometimes turn those photos into something that actually moves in a 3d space or has animated elements. Though I am not trying to take a single photo and turn it into a full blown 3D animated scene, I am trying to get more bang for the buck by giving a single photo more 3D space to move around in and by adding more traditional 2d animation in addition to the 3D to try and bring more life and interest. Years ago, just panning across an old photo was considered enough... not anymore!

My goal is always to keep the integrity of the original photo, which is usually an old one, but add enough to it to keep a modern viewer's interest.