Rick has done some remarkable work in bringing this months covers back in a presentable form. As he has mentioned there are a number of challenges in preserving and presenting these pieces. The newsprint supplements are an extreme example of the difficulties but all sheet music presents a challenge. The browning or oxidation that one sees is called foxing and is nearly universal, no matter how carefully a piece was handled. Mold and mildew, stains, owners signatures, damage by animals and insects and general ware and tear all contribute to the problem. then of course their are the indignities perpetrated by children such as blacking out the eyes or even punching through them with the point of a pencil, and then the hobby of improving the covers by painting over the covers to create your own genuine piece of art, a practice that is coming back into popularity, much to my distress. But enough ranting lets look at a couple of covers that have been presented in the past. The first is the "Charge of the Uhlans by E.H. Pfeiffer. This cover which we featured in our February 2000 tribute to mister Pfeiffer typifies a typical reconstruction effort. Let me say at this point, Parlor Songs is not a museum for sheet music. Our intent is to preserve and recreate the spirit of bygone times, not to worship the physical relics. If we were archival purists we would present the pieces in the condition in which we find them. While we do what we can not to add to the damage of the actual physical specimens, and while we try not to "improve" upon the original art work, we do try to present the covers in a way that suggests the original spirit of the piece, which in some cases means punching up the colors, fixing printing errors, and yes at times generating missing pieces of a sheet from scratch if needed.. So lets get past that and get Charge of the Uhlans ready for the February issue.

Before we even scan a piece there is much work to be done. Some pieces are very dirty from years of handling, or have ink that has rubbed off of one sheet and transferred to another. It is possible to remove much of this using transparent tape, (very scary) or with cotton swabs that have a little dried rubber cement on them (much less effective). I have only done this once or twice. It is very time consuming and the chances of lifting whole patches of the actual image is very high. I didn't do this for Uhlans but I did remove several layers of tape and binding repair material from the spine which you can see in this image. The binding repair hides some very important parts of the image and had to go. Cotton swabs, distilled water and a scalpel. One drop of water at a time,lift the tape as soon as the glue is moist but before the paper gets wet and discolors and in one short hour the first repair is gone and a very important part of the image is now displayed. Although for archival purposes or for a physical restoration there is a lot more that needs to be done, I have a real life and Rick needs this cover now so lets scan it and commence the digital work.

Our fist digital challenge is the most irritating. All of this music is bigger than our scanners so every thing is done in two passes. Right away this creates a problem in that all but the best scanners have color shifts on every pass. If you look carefully at our back issues you can see many examples of this at the joins. Any of you folks that want to help out, Umax makes a scanner big enough to handle a sheet at a single pass, it costs about 2 grand (hint, hint).

Anyway I scan the images at around 600 pixels an inch this gives me a compressed file of around 40 megabytes. Before I am done breaking out the individual elements into separate layers it will grow to 100 to 200 meg in size.

The first thing that I do is isolate the lose, torn, missing areas and fix them by rotating them into place, blending the edges using the rubber stamp tool, and just plain copying pieces that I think are similar from other areas of the image. I have even been know to "borrow" parts of a similar image from another of the artists pieces. If I need a spare hand, hoof, weapon or tree off I go to another sheet, grab a likely replacement, resize, rotate, change perspective and blend it in. A little bit of the publishers logo missing? Not a problem, pick it off of another sheet.

Next comes the real work, cleaning the image up, blending it all together, making the colors vibrant and as close to what I think they looked like originally. To do this I start breaking the image down into what PhotoShop calls layers. I will pull out titles, text, major blocks of color and try to separate out the individual design elements. Aside from the damage, one of the problems with Uhlans is a major color shift with most of the white horse. Other than the head, the horse is more pink than white I am pretty sure mister Pfeiffer didn't intend it to be this way. While I didn't get it fixed in time for publication this image shows the progress on that part of the image. Once I get the big things fixed I start what I call pixel bashing. When I pixel bash I go in at extreme magnifications and fix and blend things one pixel at a time.

Some times while a sheet may be undamaged, the foxing or accumulation of dirt is just plain too much to fix. So I basically redraw the piece. I can usually get the major layout by tracing the image or using the magic wand tool. Then I just "paint" a new image from scratch. Here are a few examples. Well I hope that this hasn't disalusioned anyone. But this is how we bring you Parlor Songs every month.

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