My Mom in Cleveland (Rescued and Colorized Snapshot)

Last year, my aunt sent me a package of photos from my mother's album, pictures of my mom before she got married.  This image began as one of those photos, a small black and white snapshot.  The exposure was wrong, so the image was very faint, almost uniformly gray.  And there were a lot of marks on it besides. But I could see enough to know that I wanted to see more, so I scanned the image in the computer.  I did some basic cleanup of the worst marks with iPhoto. Then I used Painter to "equalize" the lights and darks, and the image became clearer, though some areas were still too dark and some were too light.  But I could see enough to draw into what was there, using digital pastel to re-define the lines of her hair and coat.  Then I had fun creating the color with digital pastel and color overlays. ( I thought my mom would like the red hat.)  On the front of the actual snapshot, my mom wrote "Cleveland, Ohio, 10/2/41" so since this was taken in October, I gave the trees a golden cast. And why Cleveland? Apparently she took a lot of bus trips to visit friends. (Whoever took this photo was one of those friends.) It was good to work on this project for Mother's Day and to spend a time thinking about my mother as an independent young woman, touring around the country on her own.