I can't remember how long ago it was that I saw some kind of social media or blog post about photoshopping hard to read headstones. And I didn't bookmark it, of course, so I saw what photoshop could do, but not how. I've made a few attempts at it since then but hadn't had any success until this week.
On Monday morning Donald and I went to pay our respects to his grandmother. She is buried at Mount Saint Mary Cemetery in Flushing, a peaceful and very well kept cemetery, but huge. Being me, I always look at other headstones as we drive and walk through the cemetery, knowing that the information on some of the older stones may be soon lost to time if it isn't already.
On this visit, I only had time to photograph a few non-family stones but when I got home I realized that I had never uploaded my last batch of photos to Find A Grave! So, of course, I immediately got to work.
Soon, I encountered this photo.
The Find A Grave page for this cemetery does have a link to a diocesan site with plot and grave numbers, which are also engraved on many of the stones there, but I was striking out with the name at the top and encountering conflicting information on some dates, so I tried Photoshop again and got this.
While this result is not ideal, I was able to see some details that I couldn't with the original photo, so I was very happy. Then I got lucky and discovered that I did have a better photo already.
Still, I was excited by the progress I had made and when I encountered the photo below the next day, I was encouraged to try again.
Photoshop helped make these names much more legible.
Unfortunately, this is not my family so I still don't have quite enough information to put this stone up on Find A Grave. I'm thinking that the bottom name is a surname and the first three names are given names, but I'll have to do some more research to find out for sure or contact the cemetery office to see what they know since I struck out on their site.
Meanwhile, I cannot tell you exactly how I got the photo to this point but I was able to almost duplicate the result.
I opened the original in PSE again, went to Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Shadows and Highlights and made the following changes:
Then I went back to Enhance > Adjust Color > Adjust Hue/Saturation and made these changes:
Of course, every photo and headstone presents unique challenges and these settings surely won't work in every situation, but if you are having trouble with legibility, this could help you.
And while we're on this subject of headstones, I had a great experience yesterday with the Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness group on Facebook. I have no Polish ancestry or experience with the language, in fact, I had to use Google Translate just to figure out what language this is on the headstone below.
But within minutes of posting a request for help to the RAOGK group, three members had jumped in to provide me with a translation. I just love it when the genie community comes together!
This cemetery is filled with interesting headstones, I mean, if you're into that! One headstone had so many names I'm still wondering how everyone fit in the plot. I also discovered after we got home that the Ronzoni family mausoleum that we pass every time we visit is in fact THE Ronzoni pasta family.
After again consulting the Find A Grave page for this cemetery, it looks like volunteers are fulfilling photo requests pretty quickly, so when we visit Tessie, I will concentrate on finding stones that look to be deteriorating. I'm sure I'll have to turn to Photoshop again, so if you do know of a good tutorial or know yourself what other settings I could play with, please let me know.
It is going to be a busy summer for me, but I do hope to have some research to share soon. In the meantime, I have another Honor Roll post ready for July 1st and I wish you happy hunting!
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