My Favourite Photo (learning how to make images better for publication)

I am giving a presentation to the Family Tree Genealogy Gadgets Club in September about Creating Visuals for Publication. See the information at the end of this post to find how you can join in.

I use a lot of images in my blogs, published articles and presentations. Some are photos of people. Many are diagrams, graphs or copies of documents from parish registers, books and articles or websites.

All are useful in demonstrating the subject matter of my publications and talks. In my presentations, particularly, I like to have colour and images that attract attention and keep interest. Not to be too critical but slides with a lot of text, that presenters just read, leave me cold, even though those speaking are probably very knowledgeable in their areas.

With too much text on the screen, I suspect participants spend too much time trying to read the information (many likely cannot keep up), lose their place in the talk and mss important things the speaker is trying to impart. I confess I do read a lot of my text, mainly so that I don’t forget to say something, but I try not to put too many words on the slide.

Many images need to be cleaned up and put for publication, whether in a magazine, a book, a family summary or a presentation. I use MyHeritage a lot for this as I mentioned in previous posts: MyHeritage Photo Repair (26 May 2021) and Using MyHeritage’s Photo Improvement Processes (28 Feb 2022). Before I publish, I use my Adobe Photoshop software to put them in the best format.

One of the examples I am using in my talk is a photo taken of me and my mother in 1947. It is one of my favorite pictures. The original snapshot was a bit washed out and not framed as well as it could have been.

So, using Photoshop I used the brightness/contrast adjustment to improve it. Then I trimmed it and centred the people.

It was not bad but on closeup was still a bit fuzzy. So, I ran it through the Enhancement process at MyHeritage. The resultant image was much sharper.

Then I wondered, what might we have looked like if my dad had been using colour film? MyHeritage has software for that as well.

It was not the best result that I have obtained using this process, but it was still pretty neat to see it. It is now framed and on the bookshelf above my desk.

There are many tools you can use to produce informative and attention-getting visuals for your article, presentation or family history writeup. I encourage people to look at all the options. One drawback, of course, is that some will cost a bit of money for software programs or subscriptions to sites, like MyHeritage, that have processes to help modify images. I don’t know of a way around that unless you have a knowledgeable friend or relative, or a child or grandchild that can help.

Come and hear my presentation in September.

The session is available two ways:

1. to those on a 7-day free trial to Family Tree Plus (to take a free trial see www.family-tree.co.uk/membership)
2. to members of Family Tree Plus (£7.99 a month for existing Family Tree subscribers; £9.99 a month for non-subscribers) - for details, see here.

If you have any queries about the presentation or about Family Tree Plus, please email enquiries@family-tree.co.uk