I just scanned this old color negative and I wanted to fix it up. I'm writing in June of 2026 and using consumer-level Photoshop restoration tools. I'm making certain to include the date because the tech is changing so rapidly; there are already tools in PS—AI Denoise, for instance—that I've barely started to use. As far as I know, though, at this point in time there is no automatic process that will enhance an original in a way that doesn't give it what any careful observer would call an AI sheen.

AI sheen results from the algorithm modifying original detail and replacing it with results gleaned from massive-scale image-harvesting. A glint in the eye becomes an uber-glint, an idealized and unimaginative replication. The AI can't find the true and very particular details the human brain can distinguish and the results are unsatisfying. Reality is smoothed and typified. We replace the poem, in effect, with the Hallmark card. (I acknowledge that this is a temporary issue.)

As the details illustrate I'm no stranger to the AI, just not in the terribly obvious way that PS restores a photo with its Neural Filter. In this picture I adjusted the geometry of the original, tilting it slighty and pulling on its corners to eliminate lens distortion. This created some empty areas, particularly across the left-to-center bottom of the frame. I populated these areas using Generative Fill. In this case the fill was not particularly successful, requiring me to magnify the image about four-hundred percent and replace problems with the Clone Stamp.

Tone and color were carefully adjusted as a matter of course. I also got rid of a distracting lamp in the shadowy lower-left corner using a combination of the Remove tool and the Clone Stamp. Odd that I have to say that this was a purely human decision, a matter of taste, and odder still that it leaves me with the mixed feelings I have whenever I distort reality this way. I don't know why this sets off ethical alarms in my head but it always does.

The details below illustrate the most serious problem, the deterioration of the original negative. I didn't store my negatives properly and decades later I'm seeing the results. This particular roll also suffered from strips of plastic that Kodak affixed to developed film during this period. Designed to protect the negative, the strips could be easily flipped aside for scanning; twenty-five years later they had become attached to the negative and were not removable without a twenty-four hour soak in Kodak Photo-flo and distilled water.

The white dots of deterioration are in every part of the image amd particularly concentrated in the upper left corner. As Detail 2 illustrates, parts of my hair were also replaced with jagged white shapes. At this point in time, there is no way to run an algorithm and replace this stuff. I expect this to change with tools like the Texture slider in the Raw Filter tool, but for right now there is no way to fix it in a satisfying way without eliminating the damage one spot at a time—by hand, so to speak, an archaic description! I use the new Remove tool with high magnification to replace the flaws. It's marketed by Adobe as a means to eliminate tourists in one's snap of the Eiffel Tower, but I've found it to be more useful on a micro level, and better than the Spot Healing brush which softens the pixels a bit.

We're very much in the middle of a long process that will eventually be entirely automated. This is the state-of-the-art in the middle of 2026, for this consumer at least.

A tornado skipped across the local lake that June. I was grilling on our deck, about four-hundred feet above the water on a neighboring hill. I went inside for something and when I came back out, the tornado had come and gone. We heard nothing. I only slowly became aware that many of the tall pines surrounding the lake houses had been snapped in half. It was all over in a few seconds.

The hamlet where we lived was called Garrison. It was located in a township called Philipstown; Philipstown constitutes the western third of Putnam County, the only part that votes for Democrats. The specific neighborhood was Continental Village, a housing development built along a stream that fed an artificial lake. Somewhere in the Village, probably along Canopus Creek, was the site of a supply depot (thus Garrison) for Washington’s army. This was burnt to the ground by British forces during Washington’s initial retreat. The place reeks of history.

During the middle of the last century a place called Cimarron Ranch occupied most of what would become Continental Village. It was a dude ranch for folks from the city. There were also stables and rental horses; older locals remembered riding there. At some point a large part of the ranch was sold to developers who turned it into half-acre housing lots. I believe it was these developers who built a dam across Canopus Creek and created Cortland Lake. Many lots became sites for lakeside homes.

Our house was about four-hundred feet above sea level, halfway up a hill looming over the lake. It felt higher, especially when you walked up the dirt road from the nearest paved street. It was set back about a quarter-mile from the water; no one was going to be diving off our deck. Through the trees we could see a few homes on the opposite shore.

Everyone in the Village paid a moderate fee for a summer pass to a beach on our side of the lake. Lifeguards were on duty, the water was regularly tested for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, and the lake floor was regularly scoured of weeds. You could walk down to the beach in fifteen minutes.

When we left the East Village in 1997 we went north until we could afford to buy. We found a house on the very first day we looked, a modified A-frame called a “Banff Chalet” on the plans, obviously plucked from a design book. The eastern end of the house had a wall of large windows opening onto a wraparound deck with a gorgeous view of the valley. We lived among tree-tops.

We had no plans for a child, we just wanted to get away from what the East Village had become. We were tired of the junkies and drunks, the noise, the routine incivilities of the New York demimonde. Our rent-stabilized apartment was only $600 a month, but we would have had to quadruple that to find a space with another dozen square feet. We wanted to spread out a bit.

A no point did we think we’d have a view of a forested hillside and a lake; we were just hoping for a realistic commute to the city on the Hudson Line Metro-North Railroad. We got lucky.

Two hours to the north of Garrison along the mighty Hudson lies Olana, the home of Hudson River School painter Frederick Church. He designed the house and modified the grounds to make the most of its hilltop above the river, and the original Orientalist furnishings inside are more-or-less intact. It's an extraordinary structure and we were desperate for day-trips. This particular image of Olana’s tower looks like one of the matte shots in Vertigo during the sequences at the Spanish mission.

The interior of the house is like walking through a Sax Rohmer novel: red tufted chairs, dusty lace curtains, globe lamps, shelves of Victorian miscellany. An opium pipe would not have been out of place. Out the windows are spectacular views of the Hudson carved out of the living landscape. Calbert Vaux, codesigner of Central and Prospect Parks, worked to turn Church’s concepts to an astonishing reality.

I took many art history classes in college; there was a great professor or two and I enjoyed every class I took. I remember very little time devoted to hyper-realistic artists like Church; at the time the canon was much more inclined to abstraction and conceptual art. Tastes change all the time and I’m glad artists like Church are again widely celebrated. Certainly he has always been a favorite of the public, and died a very wealthy man.