Photoshopping my wife

Some of the pictures in my computer are older than Windows PCs. They show my wife just after our marriage. Fair and lovely, with a red bindi on her forehead and red sindoor in the parting of her hair, her creamy skin swathed in bright silk, she faces the camera with the shining eyes of a newlywed who has discovered how deeply she is loved and cherished. She looks beautiful on the beach, beautiful on the hills, beautiful in the gardens we visited.

She loves travelling and photography and that's how we ended up with these beautiful reminders of our early years. Even today, looking at them takes my breath away. My God, what a beautiful woman I married!

She teaches at a college in Calcutta while I am in Singapore. That's why I scanned the pictures into the computer -- so I could see her every day. But the pictures had faded by the time I scanned them in. After all, we have been married for more than 20 years.

I have brighter, more recent pictures of her and she is still beautiful. But I wanted the faded old pictures to sparkle too. I have an old Adobe Photoshop Elements which can transform pictures. But I was scared of damaging the originals by trying to tweak them. So I decided to copy the pictures and tweak the copies instead. If they didn't look good, I could trash them -- the originals would still be intact.

I needn't have worried -- the copies turned out to be much better than the originals. And it was so easy. All I had to do was open the pictures with Photoshop Elements, copy them by clicking on "Duplicate Image", then tweak the duplicated image with two clicks -- "Enhance" and "Quick Fix". I clicked on "Quick Fix" and a pop-up box opened, offering options like "Colour correction" and adjustments in "Focus" and "Brightness".

I noticed the difference as soon as I clicked on "Colour correction". The picture was immediately transformed. It emerged in all its colour and lost that faded look.

Now I can see the pictures of my wife undimmed by time. They just needed touching up with Photoshop.