The image on the left shows a typical picture as we would have captured it during a visit to a cemetery. Although I have made it smaller for this demonstration, the original was about two and one half times this size and was roughly 640,000 characters when stored. This is much too large to effectively transfer it around the internet and too large to display on a typical screen. Even though we use a lower resolution camera for these pictures, it takes some manipulation to make the image usable.

You can also see that in this picture, even though this is a pretty good one, there is a shadow in the upper right and the tombstone was photographed from a position where I was standing in front and looking down. This would be a typical location from which you would shoot this picture assuming you are standing.

In the past we would probably have resized this picture to make it a little smaller and just posted it to the web site. Originally our objective was to try and capture some of the feeling of the cemetery, but this has proven to be impractical and left many images barely readable.

Our first step in the process is to use PhotoShop to change the perspective of the image (yes you can do this with PhotoShop) so that it now looks like we are standing directly in front of the tombstone. I left the old image behind it and you can see it peeking out from the sides at the top.

I usually need to straighten the image slightly since it is difficult to maintain a perfectly straight camera angle when you are shooting down and often at an angle.

The next step is to crop the picture down to just the relevant information, the name and dates of the person buried here. PhotoShop offers an easy way to crop the picture and you then wind up the the last image in this sequence.

This image is our final product. I also used my brightness and contrast tools within PhotoShop to make the tombstone more readable. These final adjustments can make the edges of lettering stand out more, and at times you can use these to bring out lettering that only the camera could see.

The final image is exactly 450 pixels wide and only 38,000 characters in size. Many images turn out to be much smaller when stored, but this one has a lot of color variation and that increases the size when stored. I also changed the quality from hihg to medium and compressed the picture as a JPG image.

Our final step was the naming of the image to produce a standard. This one is labeled tms_arnold_sd_01, indicating it is a tombstone picture (tms), the surname is Arnold, the person's initials are SD, and this is the first picture we have in this cemetery with this surname and initials (01).

This example makes the improvement obvious, but this was an easier one to produce. PhotoShop gives us the ability to do much more to bring out lettering and to change the perspective of pictures that will make this process much more useful as we move forward.