Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Temple Tuesday: Fixing Shirley's Bathtub


Back in the 1930s, newspapers would have to retouch photos to make them reproduce more easily within the limitations of their printing process. This rare shot of Shirley Temple in “Poor Little Rich Girl” is one of those. The white paint on the photo highlighted the area that the newspaper was supposed to reproduce. Often, airbrushing would remove grayscale tones that would not show up anyway, as you can see in the flat black of the nanny’s (played by Sara Haden) hair. Since this photo showed a deleted scene, I really had to have it, even though I knew that the white paint could not be easily removed some eighty-years after it had been applied. So...I did the next best thing. I digitally “painted” over it, using a similar low resolution shot I found on the internet for reference. Here is the final product:


See more vintage 1930s Shirley Temple photos at my main website.

1 comment:

  1. There's nothing more-disgusting than a 'ring around a bathtub.' Glad you were able to clean-up that picture, Dave!

    ReplyDelete