Fun with PhotoShop

Then again...when is PhotoShop not fun?

I offered to help with scanning some pictures for an event coming up here in the neighbourhood in a few weeks.

It’s an event to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Crystal Palace, which stood for a little over 30 years in Victoria Park just a few minutes walk from here. Modeled after the Crystal Palace built in London, England 9 years before, it was intended to house the Provincial Exhibition and other cultural events. The city, assisted by surrounding counties and municipalities erected the building in 1860 at a cost of $20,964. 31 years later it was declared unsafe and condemned.

There aren’t a lot of pictures remaining of it, and even fewer of the interior. One of the few found of the inside was an engraving of a sketch done by F. M. Bell Smith, of the Grand Firemen’s Gathering on August 6th, 1874. A copy was found on the Library and Archives Canada website. Which of course is a crummy low rez JPEG.

Another version of the image was found in a history book. It was a line drawing which I could scan at a pretty high resolution. But part of another image was overlapped in the top left corner.

Hmmmhhh....

So I cobbled this together. Don’t think I spent even 5 minutes on it. Not perfect, but it’s better than the blurry JPEG, it’s better than having part of the image obscured with part of another picture, it’s better than chopping the image off so that the balcony disappears altogether (which would have negated the sense of scale). I suspect 99.9% of people looking at it will never suspect a thing.