Original Picture

Edited Picture

One of the most interesting pictures I came across while searching for pictures to use in the HSU collages was a 1914 picture of the main HSU building burning down.  For those of you who do not know about the HSU fire, it plays a major part in the history of our campus.  So finding a picture of the actual fire is a novelty in itself.  Of course a picture that old will have some blemishes in it, and when I scanned it into the computer the became all the more apparent.  That when I started on a side quest to fix every blemish and make the picture look good again. 

Fixing the picture was more tedious than it sounds. The original picture had hundreds of white dots scattered all around on it where the film had peeled away over time. Not only that, but stains had appeared on the photo too.  I had to go in pixel by pixel and replace every white dot with a color that matched the area best.   This took forever since the picture is 800 x 500 pixels large. After a few weeks of working on this during my free time, I came to a finishing point and decided to post the pictures up on this site since I was unable to fit them into the HSU website.  Also before anyone asks, the picture(s) isn't in color, it just faded to an orange hue over time and I kept that hue intact when I scanned it.