Getting someone started in Scanning/Retouching/Photo-archiving?

[Paul F.]

Some great ideas!

I like the digicam idea... since she has finally gotten a digital camera and is learning how to use it. Well.. learning how to point and shoot with it... it's a start.


I wouldn't expect perfection in the retouching for a long while..
But it would be nice to get the "raw" scans in with reasonable quality.

Oh, and Mattkime;
I hear you on making color adjustments... but fortunately (?) many of the photo's in question are black and white. Some pics dating back to the 20's.


lafinfil;
I may just investigate any local sources of scanning... but I don't recall anyone locally having much.

[wowzer]

pRon,

I did the the digital camera thing too, but found that the pictures aren't 'perfect' as the paper on many pictures curl.

For lighting, I used a construction lamp (those aluminum lamps with a 75 watt (or was it 100 watt) bulb and a flourscent lamp.


Make sure your tripod can turn downward enough to take the shot...

GL

[hal]

Skip retouching for now...

Many scanners have nice easy one button functionality. Just get the damned things scanned (into tiff files) and worry about retouch after all the images are scanned. Don't cut corners on image quality. This is forever.

The first step, the scanning, is the easy part, but the most important part.

I actually taught my mom a few pshop tricks. Simple stuff - contrast, sharpening, cropping etc. Once iphoto came out, to my surprise, mom feels better with pshop. Great!

[olnacl]

I just began a project like your mother wants to do. I bought an Epson 4490 from OD. So far I scanned about 100 pictures and really haven't had to do any color correction - (whether the picture I scanned needed help isn't an issue here) as the scans are as good or better than the prints.
The biggest drawback is DUST. I brush the photos over my arm hair and use canned air to blow off the glass on the scanner but dust is a constant and irritating problem (consider that I'm scanning at 300 dpi and viewing the results full screen on a 37" monitor). ICE, which is included with the scanner doesn't work on reflection copy and using the Photoscop filter for dust and scratches degrades the image unacceptably. My current remedy is to use the Magic Wand to select only the area with dust (usually black/dark areas w/o much detail) and apply the filter to that area only. I use the clone stamp for individual dust motes on other areas
It is a time consuming task.
I'm saving mine as jpegs at maximum quality. This gives me a file size of about 1MB per 4x6 picture vs about 12MB for a TIFF image. I found that resaving (once) after retouching doesn't noticably affect the quality, even on my big monitor. However, with compression set anywhere below that, a resave kills the PQ. I save the scan as TIFF if I want to do retouching in more than a single session
Any suggestions from seasoned scanners highly appreciated.

[AlphaDog]

Adobe just released Elements 4.0 for the Mac. The older versions had some really great Quick Fix options, and they're probably even better in this new one. It would be really easy for her to do some basic touchup work to the old pics without having to dive head first into the whole Photoshop thing. Get her an easy to use flatbed scanner and let her start. My recommendation is that the original copy of each scan be archived and that she work only on copies. A lot of people who start projects like this find they want to go back and rework the first pictures they edited once their level of skill has increased. It is possible to rescan, but that's the most boring part of the job so, as far as I'm concerned, it should be avoided whenever possible.