How to Colorize an Old Black and White Photo in Photoshop

I've seen it a few times on Reddit, where someone will show how they took an old black and white photo that has bent corners and is all scratched and make it look new.  Here's a really good example of what i mean.

I thought i'd give it a try.  Here was the image that i started with, a picture of my grandpa when he was in the Marines.

 I set the original photograph on a dark piece of foam, put that on the ground in front of a window, and took a picture of the photograph with my camera.  I always think that natural sunlight turns out looking a lot better then using any indoor light.

To edit the photo i used Photoshop 6.  It's actually not super difficult, i really only used a few different tools.  You can see that the original photo had some creases in it, so i decided to try and fix that first.  For that i used the Clone and Spot Healing tool.  They look at the surrounding area and fill in the area selected.  That worked really well and only took about 10 minutes.  Here's what it looked like after that process.

Now for the tedious detail part of the job.  For every area you want to color, you have to trace it out and isolate it on its own individual layer.  I started with the background, so i had to trace it out, copy, paste to new layer, then change the tint to a blue. 

It's actually slightly more complicated then i am saying.  You have to do a lot of zooming and panning to get just the area you want selected.  Also layering gets a little tricky, having the things you want to show up on the top of the layer manager.  Here's a screenshot of what it looked like while working on it in Photoshop.

Several layers later i had the shirt, hat and skin about the colors i thought they should be.  With the blue background i only had to adjust the tint, but with these layers i changed some other things like contrast, saturation, and color intensity.

Here's the finished product on the right, compared to the original on the left.  It's not perfect, but pretty good for a first try.

If you want to try it, you definitely don't need a ton of Photoshop skills.  But it does take a lot of time tracing everything out.  Maybe there's a quicker way of selecting the areas, but i couldn't find one.

Arts and Crafts Room - Ribbon Rack, Shelf, Desk

Earlier I posted some pictures about a white box shelf that I made for Karrie.  It was something I completed back in October and it was made to hang on the wall.

That was just the first part of her new arts and crafts room.  She wanted a place that she could sit and have everything she needed to be able to make different arts and craft projects at home.

Karrie just started making some small hair bows and she's trying to sell them on Etsy.  Hopefully this would make it easier for her to make the bows and keep everything in order. You should check out her store and maybe by a couple of the handmade bows, she's selling them for just $6.

Here's her home page where she plans on having all of the different homemade bows she is selling:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/BowtiqueGlam

And here is the direct link to her first page where she has 2 different types of bows she is selling:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/169614173/hair-bows-for-the-glam-in-every-girl

So we looked online for a while until she found something that she liked.  The first thing she saw and asked for was a simple work desk.  It was made of three pieces, two bookshelves and a countertop. 

I thought it was a great idea and a way to incorporate both a work area and storage.  I liked it because of its simple design, combining form and function.  She could put some of her supplies on the bookshelves below the table.

We already had 2 bookshelves from when my office got rid of some of their old furniture a year ago. We've had these two small bookshelves in the basement since then.  They were both roughly the same size but one was slightly shorter than the other.

You can see that I had to add some 2x4 blocks as legs in order to raise the bookshelf to the same height as the other one.  Real simple though, I just use some wood glue and nails.  Obviously they need to be the same height so that the work surface is level.

Then I painted everything white. It took a few coats since it wasn't real wood that these shells were made out of, but rather a laminate which was glued onto particleboard. The first few coats were kind of streaky, it was sort of like painting on plastic.  Here's what one of the bookshelves looked like after the first coat.  It wasn't good.

But after the second coat of white paint it was much better.  Then i put on two coats of polyurethane, which gave it a shiny and very strong protective finish.

Next we had to decide what type of desk work top to use. So we put the bookshelves in place and tried to figure out a size using a measuring tape and a piece of cardboard.

We ended up deciding that the best thing to do would just be going to Lowe's and buying a piece of melamine.   Melamine is a very dense particleboard with a hard white plastic coating on either side.  It was actually very similar to the material that the shelves were made out of.  Although it was much heavier and much stronger at 3/4".  The only downside was that the 4x8 sheet cost $35.   But since that was our only real expense for this entire project it wasn't too bad.

In order to get the most use out of the desk Karrie and I decided to not just keep the board square, but rather conform it to an "optimal shape".  A shape that would have the most usable work surface, with everything on it easy to reach, and fit in a small space.

We decided that cutting the board to a length of 5' was the best size for the room.  That meant I had to measure several times to find the center of the 5 foot section, then draw out several radius points before cutting everything out with the jigsaw.  Here's half of the desktop cutout.  You can sort of see that when Karrie sits in the middle she will able to reach much more surface area of the desk than if it were just a square board.

I then took a large wood rasp and rounded over all the edges. That way nothing would chip and it would be a smooth edge rather than a sharp corner.

To make the cut edge look more finished I took some drywall joint compound and smeared that to all the exposed wood surface.  I actually had to do about two or three coats, standing in between, before it got the smooth finish that I was hoping for.

The last thing I did was paint the edge with some more white paint and the arts and craft table was done.  This was definitely the easiest part of the whole room.  Although none of the three things I built where that difficult.

The last thing that Karrie had wanted was something to hold all of her ribbon spools.  The obvious choice was a very simple ribbon rack which attach to the wall and easily held several spools, all at easy access.  Here were some of my early drawings that I used before I started to build anything.  I was mainly trying to figure out the angle of the cut-outs in the side boards.

The first thing I did before building was to make a pattern. You can see from this picture that I used just an 8.5x11 sheet of white paper.  On that I drew out two of the five slots that go on each side of the board.

Earlier we bought three - 4' dowels which were 1/4" in diameter.  We used that sized dowel because most of the ribbon spools holes were that size.   Each dowel cost less than $1.  I cut the 4' dowels in half and a rounded over the edges using the wood rasp.

I had some scraps of pine 1x6 in my basement and that's what I used to make the ribbon rack box.  It was real simple just a square box with slots cut out for the dowel.

After using the pattern to trace out the five slots, I used the jigsaw to cut them out.

After trying to cut out the first slot I realized that with the large jigsaw blade it would be difficult to make the sharp 180° turn.  So a quick shortcut i came up with was to use a drill bit and remove the end portion.  That way I would only have to go toward the end of the slot and the piece would come out by itself.

Here's what the ribbon rack looked like after I cut out all the slots then glued and nailed it together.  I used my new nail gun and air compressor and it made for quick work.  Yet again, another job that I can't imagine doing without my new nail gun.

Here it is standing up right with the dowels in place.  At this point I was trying to figure how I would attach it to the wall once it was all done.  I thought of using little metal brackets but I ended up coming up with an even simpler solution that was actually stronger.  I'll show you how I attached it to the wall at the end.

I took some of that spackle I had and filled in all of the rough edges, nail holes, or gouges in the wood.

Then I sanded everything down with my vibrating sander.   Also I sanded inside the cut outs of fine wood rasp.  It was pretty dusty.

Here's a quick video i made while i was building the ribbon rack.  I'm trying to do more video's in between taking pictures because i think it gives a better description of what i'm building.  Although i'm terrible at explaining what i'm trying to do.

Ribbon Rack - How to Build Plans

http://youtu.be/hnJ3h2_LeK8

After it was all sanded I put two coats of white paint on it and then two coats of polyurethane.  Just like I did for the bookshelves.

Here's the ribbon rack attached to the wall with some of the spools of ribbon on the dowels.  You can see how all the different types of ribbon are easily accessible in this very simple design.  You just lift the entire dowel off.

Now I said earlier I would explain how I attached it to the wall, so here's what I did.  I drilled two holes through the back of the top cut out.  The first hole, which i drilled from the front, was big enough for the screw head to be countersunk into the board.  Then I drilled a through hole all the way to the back, just large enough for the thread portion of the screw.  That way all it took was one screw to hold up the shelf.  And the screw was not visible at all since it was countersunk halfway through the thickness of the board.

Next I attached the wooden box shelf of the wall.  This was much heavier than the ribbon rack and I had to come up a different plan of how to attach it.  I knew I wanted to attach it to the studs in the wall and not just screw into the drywall.

clean and simple wall shelf, mount to wall, stud finder

So this time I took some angled aluminum and cut out small brackets.  I attached the brackets to the shelf at 16 inches on the left, center, and right of the top and bottom boards.  I used six brackets in all.  I attached them in a way that they would screw into the studs and that the shelf would be centered on the wall.  It took a bit of measuring, and using the stud finder, but it wasn't too complicated.  Then all I had to do was hold the shelf in place, making sure it was level, and screw the 2 inch drywall screws into the studs.

Here is what the finished arts and crafts room looked like.  Everything seemed to match since the shelf, rack and table were all painted white.  It didn't take up a lot of space, there was plenty of storage space for all the arts and crafts supplys.

And here's what it looks like with everything put in place.  Karrie got the red baskets from the dollar store.  We plan on getting a different chair, something a bit taller, but for now are using this old office chair. 

The last thing she needs is a good light to brighten up any of the projects she is working on.  It will have to be something that can move around and adjust its height when she's working on a small projects.  But for now everything seems to work great.

Internet TV Setup - Watch Television Online

"How to setup the TV and computer so that you don't have to watch your internet TV on your laptop.  Now you can sit on the couch and watch Netflix on your big screen TV."

There are lots of videos on the internet and on youtube, that show different websites you can go to in to watch TV on the internet.  I've done that myself in the form of a few blog posts and youtube videos.

Here's a link to my most viewed blog post of all time.  I just explain how sites like project free tv work and how to watch free TV shows.  And this is a youtube video i made basically doing the same thing but going step by step guide to Project Free TV with a live feed of my screen so that you can see what i'm doing.

But nobody on youtube ever really showed how they actually watched these videos at home.  I assume most people watch internet TV on their laptop or possibly on there iPad.   Maybe they sat at their desk and watched it through their desktop computer on a small monitor.  But for the past several years I have been watching internet TV on my full size flat screen TV in my living room.

Whenever people come over and see how I watch TV they are always amazed.  I think the more that people find out that this type of internet TV viewing is a possibility, the more people will start using it at their house. The best part about it, is that it's not complicated at all.  You are simply using your large flatscreen TV as your computer monitor and then controlling everything from your couch using a wireless keyboard and mouse.   That's it! 

I made this video in order to show people what I'm talking about.  It basically reiterates what I have just written about, but when you see my set up it will make it a lot easier to understand.

Internet TV Setup - Watch Free Television on a Computer 

http://youtu.be/jXDHqneQsro

You can see that at first it looks a bit complicated, but it's really not.  I use all the same cables as people have been using for years, there is nothing new.

I definitely think that in the future companies will try to combine the computer and television into one unit.  This is already happening with products like iTV, Google TV, XBox One, Playstation 4, etc.   All of those are just fancy computers that incorporate web browsers and of the functions that a computer already offers.  But they are all hybrids of the computer itself. If you're going to spend $100 - $400 you might as well just get a computer that can do everything they do and more.  In fact you probably already have a computer that can do everything and you don't need to spend any money at all.  That's the best part.  If you're reading this on anything other than a smart phone you probably already have all the equipment you need.

All I can say is give it a try, you won't be disappointed.  All you have to do is connect your audio and video cables from your computer to your TV.  That will turn your small computer monitor into a large flatscreen TV capable of viewing any show on the Internet.

When it comes to what show to watch and how to watch it, that's when those links up at the top come into play. Check out my blog posts and youtube videos on what are the best sites to go to, in order to watch any show or live sports on the internet.  Good luck and if you have any questions please ask me in the comments section below.

Fix Caulk Around a Sink

Five years ago when I first moved into the house, one of the projects I worked on was to re-caulk the sink.  It's a white porcelain sink with a melamine counter top. The caulk around the edge was all discolored and cracked.  So I scraped out and re-caulked everything and it looked great... well for about a month anyway.

I realized I had used the wrong caulk because it started to crack immediately. It wasn't real bad and didn't get much worse over the past five years, but it was only noticeable. So the other week I decided to fix it and this time I was going to use the right silicone caulk that I should've used the first time.  Here's what the sink looked like before I started.

And here is what that bad cracked caulk looked like.  From up close it looks pretty terrible but from far away you couldn't really tell, it wasn't that noticeable. 

The first thing I did was get out the utility knife and try to scrape the old cracked caulk away. It worked pretty well for getting the bulk of the material. 

However I did have to use this other razor blade knife to scrape with the flat edge along the counter top.  This worked really well and getting all the rest of the caulk which was stuck to the counter top.

For the small area in the back I had used the small razor blade. I couldn't get in there with any other tool although it wasn't super critical since no one would ever see it back there.

Here's what it looked like when I was done scraping caulk off just a one half of the sink.  There were lots of brown and yellow pieces that I had removed.

The reason I decided to do this now, was because we just finished remodeling our family room.  And when we installed the crown molding we had to use the right caulk in order to fill the cracks.  For that job we used crown molding white caulk which had only a small amount of silicone.  But for this job around the kitchen sink the best thing to use is 100% silicone. That way when the sink and counter top expand and contract separately the silicone will be able to stretch and move instead of crack.  Here's the caulk we used for the sink.

This is what it looked like when I just started adding the caulk around the edge. It didn't look very pretty because I was trying to do it one-handed with the camera in the other hand. But the good thing is that it doesn't have to look pretty you just have to get the material out there at first.  Although the better job you do spreading the caulk, the easier it is to smooth it out.

Then the hard part comes in when you have to go back and smooth it all out using your finger. This is the part that takes all the time, where you are sliding down the sink trying not to take too much material away by rounding over the edge.

You can see that there was a lot of cleanup and I did end up using way more silicone that I needed to. I definitely could've gotten away with putting a smaller bead around the edge of the sink.

Here's what some of the finished product looked like, a smooth edge in transition between the sink and counter top.

And here's the finished product. You can't really tell from this distance though but it looks a lot better. And it's been over a three months now since I installed the new silicone caulk and there aren't any cracks yet. 

I'm confident that it will stay that way because this caulk is still rubbery and flexible to the touch where is the old stuff hardened up the next day.