In September 2021, the LBJ Museum in San Marcos, Texas requested assistance in preserving two prints at risk of further degrading while on display.  To keep any further aging from affecting the original, I also provided replacement prints for viewing so the originals could be safely stored away.  One of the images, a 1939 portrait of Lyndon Baines Johnson, also had a difficult to read inscription in faded red ink.  The museum manager approved creating a black and white version on the image, since the original print’s color was largely due to staining and yellowing from age.  Due to the strong color of the ink, I was then able to use a Black & White Filter in Photoshop to provide the museum with a much more legible print for display.

The original image and inscription.

I began by opening an already cropped and adjusted version of the print in Photoshop.  To add the filter I selected the Layer Menu, New Adjustment Layer, then Black & White.  Adding these changes on a new layer made it easier to compare changes by turning the layer visibility on and off, in addition to letting me fine-tune the adjustments to make sure that all of the tonal values in the image looked similar between the color and grayscale versions.  The Black & White filter’s baseline adjustments didn’t show any improvement in the legibility of the text.  Using the color adjustment sliders, I removed all red from the image by moving the slider all the way to the left.  This dramatically darkened the text. Since the original also had a little bit of red in the shadows of the original, this also darkened the whole image more than I wanted, so I brought some brightness back in by adjusting the yellow slider to the right until the tone of the values matched closely with the color version. At this point, the image was ready to print.

A cropped color sample of the faded text

A black and white sample of the same text adjusted for better definition and legibility

The final black and white image ready for print