8/16/2020 Topic: Greetings! And um, help? ThatDutchWeirdo

Hi all! I was a big time lurker on this forum five or six years ago. I loved reading all the trip reports and seeing photos of the desert. And then for some reason I forgot about this site. (Until the other day, but I'll get to that.) As a teen, I was introduced to Anza Borrego through several trips organized by a desert lover and visited all the usual sights like 17 Palms, Pumpkin Patch, Carrizo Trestle, Split Mountain, etc. I don't get out there that way much anymore--last time was two years ago when I took a foreign exchange student out to see Font's Point and the sculptures around town. I'd thought about visiting again during the Spring of this year to take some photos, but then Covid and the shutdown happened.... Maybe this winter I'll get out there for some more amateur photography. But the reason I suddenly remembered this forum is because of DStretch. Recently, my uncle asked me to try and clean up the text on an old Dutch gravestone he wants to read (he's big into genealogy and is trying to trace family trees.) I had taken pictures of it years ago when visiting the area, cleaned them up in Photoshop and made them mostly legible. I've since lost those photos and he's lost the info I sent translating the text. He recently sent me new photos, thinking I could clean them up again in PS, but the headstone is now far less readable. I tried everything I know with levels and channels, but couldn't make them more readable. I don't know if that's because the headstone is beyond hope, or my modest PS skills weren't up to the task. That's when I remembered DStretch and wondered if it might coax out more detail. I googled and discovered the iDStetch app and bought that thinking it'd be a good quick solution, but my ancient iPad mini apparently isn't compatible with it. This is gonna sound cheap, but I really don't want to fork out another $50 for the main program just to see if it can do anything with a couple of gravestone photos. And if it doesn't work, I'm then out a total of $70 bucks. I'm embarrassed that my introduction here involves asking a favor, but would it be okay to post the photos, and would someone here who has DStretch be willing to run them through it real quick just to see if anything pops? Personally, I think it's a lost cause without better pictures, but I don't want to go back to my uncle with that conclusion before I've tried everything I know. Thanks for reading through my long ramble!

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