My sister had some old slides from the early to mid 1960's from her husbands family. These were slides that were faded to the point of being nearly black.

To show you what they looked like, take a look at this one:

If you didn't know it you would swear that this picture was unsavable. Don't swear, it just isn't nice. And in this case you would be soooooo wrong, too.

How did you find the way to fix this photo, you might ask .

First off, I use Linux as my operating system. I use Suse, and Red Hat, and Mandrake versions, and I like the level of support. I have tried to get questions answered by the manufacturer of some other operating system, but that costs money, or is covered under some mysterious proprietary trade secret.

With the Linux OS, and other open source software, there are answers available. The level of support and information that I have found within the Linux world is so far superior to anything that I have found any place else, it is incredible.

To make a long story a little shorter than it could have been (yes, I could have made it horribly long) I found a book. The title of the book is “Essential GIMP for Web Professionals”, by Michael J. Hammel and published by Prentice Hall PTR.

This book has so much information about GIMP that it really is a good value.

I am going to tell you how to fix some of your underexposed pictures, so that you don't delete them. You can not only play with photos in GIMP, but you can fix them too.

Once you have your image, whether it is a screwed up digital image, or a scan of an old photo, it doesn't matter:

1. Right click (RC) on the image. This will bring up your work menu or “WM”

2. Go the the selection for “Layers” and select “Layers, Channels & Paths”

This brings up the screen that shows all of the “layers” in your photo.

3. Go to your layer box and RC on the indicator for your background layer. From this menu choose “Duplicate Layer”

4. Click on the Background Copy and go to your picture window.

There are two pages in this articles.

Page 2 sorry folks, I got a little windy on this one.