RE: filmscanners: Archiving Photos (a little off-topic)

["Jawed Ashraf" <Jawed@cupidity.force9.co.uk>]

Tomasz, I suggest you spend a month experimenting, getting to know the
process.

Read Margulis (buy a copy for version 4 of Photoshop - which I suppose is
cheaper than a current edition - as PS techniques haven't evolved too
rapidly recently.  Browse a bookstore copy of the current edition to see
what the difference is).  I read it in a day, not in an effort to understand
every last little detail, but to get an overview of the *wide* variety of
techniques required in colour "correction".  I'd already been playing with
Photoshop for a month or so reasonably seriously, so I was familiar with
chunks of what he describes.  I ignored the chapter on Moire and with a bit
of luck you can too.  Just bear with his obsession with CMYK-mode - it's not
as great as he makes out, if you aren't publishing (newspaper, magazine,
book etc.), as far as I can tell.

After two or three months you'll probably get paranoid about some of your
early work and go back and try to re-do some of the more difficult things.
It might help you to keep all your early scans in their un-touched state,
i.e. before any edits, just so that you can go back to them.

After a while you'll probably be happy to forget the "raw scan files" and
save all your scans in their "finalised" form, at full resolution and
something like JPEG quality level 9 or 10 or 11 (in Photoshop) - that will
save you lots of disk or CDR space.  The lower the resolution, the higher
you should keep the quality level.  11 is being rather perfectionist though.

>From these "Master JPEGs" you might produce "compilation" CDs containng
hundreds of images in lower resolution and lower JPEG quality, for you
family to have.  When your family asks for prints, you can refer back to
your original master JPEGs.

Jawed

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
> [mailto:owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk]On Behalf Of Tomasz Zakrzewski
> Sent: 24 July 2001 01:02
> To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
> Subject: Re: filmscanners: Archiving Photos (a little off-topic)
>
>
> Lynn Allen wrote:
> > but I had 5000 pictures to do in 10 month's time
>
> That's exactly my task at the moment.
> I've just bought a rather good flatbed (Agfa Arcus 1200, 14bit color) to
> scan my whole archive of family pictures from the last 100 years.
> Since this is a very time consuming project I must do everything right the
> first time. And since I'm not that skilled yet I wonder what the
> most proper
> routine for scanning archival prints is. I'm planning to save all the
> pictures as tiffs at resolutions from 300dpi (5x7prints) up to
> 1200dpi (very
> small prints) and make additional jpegs for quick reference.
> Should I scan and save files with 16bit color?
> Do I need the same for b&w prints?
> What about color prints that need strong color correction? In
> Poland during
> the 70's and 80's only East German photographic paper was available. Those
> prints have a very strong reddish color cast now. Auto Adjust helps a lot
> but then some additional manual corrections are necessary. Should
> I stretch
> the histogram values from 0 to 255 or leave the ends somewhat closer
> together?
>
> I simply don't want to discover that after having recorder 200
> CD-Rs I made
> a mistake which makes my effort worthless or the results not optimal.
> Maybe you some place on the Web delaing with this matter?
>
> Regards
>
> Tomasz Zakrzewski
>
> online portfolio
> www.zakrzewski.art.pl
>
>