Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510100020
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He was 6, and his father took him into the basement to a counter between the hot-water heater and the washing machine.
The elder Commeau showed Glenn how to tilt the developing tray up and rock it so the chemicals washed over the paper evenly.
"I can still smell the chemicals, the developer and the fixer," Commeau, now 47, said. "The smells are so pungent in my mind."
After carrying a rifle and a camera through World War II, Joseph Commeau returned home to New Jersey with a dream of opening up a real studio. But Glenn was born, and the studio dream was relegated to the basement.
Joseph Commeau took team pictures, portraits of people around their neighborhood, whatever needed to be done. Glenn helped out, and the little operation became Joseph Commeau & Son, Photography.
Commeau has been taking and developing pictures for more than 40 years now. In the Blacksburg studio he opened in 1978, Photography by Glenn, he's got a dark room, chemicals, the whole bit.
But where his father stood at a counter beside the hot water heater, Commeau sits at a desk surrounded by computers, keyboards, a stack of hard drives and a nest of cables.
He speaks a language his father wouldn't understand, all full of gigabytes and RAM and pixels per inch.
"There's no more dark room magic anymore. The magic is right here," he said, pointing at his Power Macintosh 8100.
Commeau operates a commercial studio, taking team pictures and high school yearbook portraits like his dad did. But he spends most of his time manipulating pictures on the computer. He changes backgrounds, restores old pictures and even puts people into photographs where there were none before.
Is it art? Well, Commeau considers himself a photographic artist. He studied art and photography in college, and, he says, he couldn't do what he does with images on the computer if he hadn't.
He uses programs like Adobe Photoshop and Painter. Painter simulates the act of painting on canvas, right down to the brush types and widths, how wet the brush is, and the texture of the canvas. To use the program well, Commeau says, you need to already understand real painting.
Commeau can change a photograph's color, add color where there was none, manipulate shading, even restore parts of a photograph that were too faded to look like anything.
Recently, a woman brought a 50-year-old photograph to him. It was a cherished item, the only picture the woman had of her mother. But it was tattered around the edges and cracked in the middle.
Using the Painter program, Commeau first restored the damaged areas. The process is a lot like skin grafting, or maybe patching damaged wallpaper. He finds undamaged parts of the picture that match the damaged parts. In this case, he was dealing with an intricate print on a dress. He transplants those good parts over the damaged ones to fill in.
There was also a heavy shadow across the woman's face. Her eyes were lost in the dark band over her eyes.
Commeau placed a tiny white dot where each of her eyes would be. He lightened the shadow, too.
Suddenly, the faceless, lifeless woman was alive and looking out of the picture.
He has taken images of deceased family members from older pictures and added them to a new family portrait.
Someone once brought him a dingy, pale picture showing two or three people in a group. He scanned it into the computer, worked some magic, and before he was done, 6 more people had showed up in the picture.
From there, the pictures are transferred back to photographic negatives and printed just like any other photo.
Commeau realizes what he does raises the question of whether you can "believe" photography anymore.
"I do not alter the look," he explained. "I don't disrespect the quality of the work."
Either way, it's an impressive skill, and one Commeau taught himself.
He bought his first computer, an Apple Plus, in 1980.
"I used to say, 'Someday I'll be able to do all my work on my computer,''' he said. "All my friends thought I was absolutely crazy."
But just eight years later, he bought the first version of the Photoshop software and went to work learning how to use it.
Since then, computers, software and Commeau have all come a long way. That first Apple he bought had a total of 64k, or 64,000 bytes, of disk storage space. The computer he uses now has 6 gigabytes of disk space. That's 6 million k, or almost 100,000 times what his old Apple had.
It also has 140 megabytes of RAM, or random access memory. That's the stuff that allows the computer to do more things at once and do them faster. The average home computer has about 8 megabytes or less.
Commeau is as caught up in the computer part of what he does as he is the camera end.
"If desk top computers had come out before I got interested in photography, I would have stayed in computers," he said.
But as it turned out, he's made what is for him a happy marriage of the two. His only worry is that bigger and better computers are coming along all the time.
"I love the field, I love the medium, but it gets frustrating. It's always changing."
Everyday Glenn Commeau gets a little farther from his father's basement studio. And his own son is another level away altogether.
Chris Commeau works with computers in Northern Virginia, but not with photographs.
He edits sound for video clips.
by CNB