Hi, Tomasz:
I *thought* there might be others out there with the same type of project.
:-)
AFAICT, the programme you propose is the most truly "archival" way to
procede (although the most bit- and storage-space intensive). It has the
added benefit of forward-flexibility; that is to say, when DVD recording
becomes widely available, or a new storage medium comes on the scene, the
pictures can be transfered to the new media easily. I might, under those
circumstances, be tempted to *up* the dpi on 5x7s to 5-600dpi. One never
knows, and apparently you're not working with storage/size constraints. I
*would* suggest that you use triple-redundancy--that is, record at least 3
of every CD and store them in different locations, none of them hot, and not
all of them in the same building.
As for 16-bit vs. 8-bit recording for B/W prints, there's little to gain
*except* in the few that have very close values in some areas (and you
*will* find a few, unexpectedly). Those areas may, on rare occassions, bite
you on the arse, so to speak. :-) Otherwise, 16-bit takes up twice the space
of 8-bit B/W pictures, and 8-bit are pretty good. It's your call.
The red cast in old color photos is not limited to Poland. It's more likely
from the fugitive yellow and blue analine dyes used to make the print than
the paper (although acid paper will often do the same thing). It's a b*tch
to correct, because there's so little yellow and cyan left to record.
Vuescan's "Faded Image" often helps, but I don't know if VS works with the
Agfa Arcus 1200. My advice is to pick the absolute *worst* example you can
find and spend several hours retouching it. You may not be able to "bring it
all the way back," but you'll learn a lot. I've found the color correction
tools in Photoshop to be the most helpful, but Corel's are good, too. I
generally leave the histogram where it is, in that I think anything beyond
that is "interpolated" (i.e. added by the computer to where it doesn't
exist), but I could be wrong.
Anyway, good luck, and if you run into trouble feel free to contact me--not
that I can help every time, but I can try.
Best regards--LRA
>From: "Tomasz Zakrzewski" <tomzakrz@ka.onet.pl>
>Reply-To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
>To: <filmscanners@halftone.co.uk>
>Subject: Re: filmscanners: Archiving Photos (a little off-topic)
>Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 02:02:21 +0200
>
>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
>
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