Blending the past with the present is an amazing feat! Thanks to Canvas 6, the final step of the process is a breeze.
The first step in the process of going Retro in the Metro is to acquire the historical architectural images. The images that work most successfully are those that show architectural features that still exist today. These particular photographs came from the Nashville Public Library and Tennessee State Library and Archives.

Next, the exact location where the older photos were taken must be established, and a new photo taken from that very spot, at approximately the same time of day.

After the resulting images are scanned, the image editing capabilities of Canvas 6 take over! These scans were spotted, sharpened and color corrected, then placed into new Canvas documents.

Using Canvas' Freeform effect along with simple push-and-pull resizing, the two images are made to overlay and match up with each other as closely as possible. The Transparency slider allowed me to see through the top photo while adjusting it to match the bottom image.
Now the real creative fun starts! To make the past blend seamlessly into the present, simply click and hold on the Sprite Layer icon in the Tools palette, then navigate to the Vector Transparency Tools. Doing so places an editable mask on the selected image.

In the case of the Ryman Auditorium (above), I put an oval Vector Transparency mask on the color image as described above, then dragged the handles to achieve the desired blend of masking effects. If you were to view the resulting mask by itself, the white areas are opaque, while the black are transparent (with varying shades of gray inbetween), thus allowing the color image to fade gently into the black and white!

Another approach to using the Sprite Layer mask is shown at left. In this case, I placed the older image over the newer, masked the black-and-white image, and painted transparency onto the mask, revealing selected areas of color underneath.

The text was copied and pasted from another image selection, and the drop shadow created by darkening and Gaussian-blurring another copy of the text.
The gradient method of masking was by far the quickest and simpliest means of achieving a faded effect, and allowed for easy experimentation.

Once again, a Sprite Layer was applied to the top (black and white) photo, the gradient tool selected, and a line drawn across the image at various angles from top to bottom and side to side until the desired effect was achieved.

The result of these simple Canvas techniques is a batch of successful new Retro Metro images!

To see more of my photographic work, please visit my Online Photographic Portfolio.

Alternate versions of these Canvas images are available here. See my earlier Photoshop versions of the Retro Metro series here.
By the way, the logo at the top of these pages, the "Get Back" navigation button on the bottom, the background image and the "How To" image above were also created in Canvas 6! The logo combines a scan of a section of the Canvas 6 manual cover (inverted to negative for that "retro" look), some vector shapes filled with color and decreased in opacity, and text. The "Get Back" button is text over a neon stroke effect. The background "retro bubbles" are simple vector shapes filled with primary colors and decreased in opacity, rendered and exported as gifs, then tiled. Finally, the "How To" image started with the photo of the bricks, over which I pasted the black-and-white photo (the jagged edge was done with the lasso in option-click mode, then copied). A second copy of the black-and-white image was pasted and sent behind the other, then lightened, blurred and stretched to produce a torn poster effect. The "graffitti" was written with the paint brush tool, then filtered to roughen it up a bit.