Archiving Old (Antique) Prints - Scan VS Photograph (long ..

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

I'm undertaking a project to archive (and make available on CD) a large
number of old prints that are currently owned by various older members
of my extended family. Most of these prints were made from the 1920s
to the 1960s, and very few negatives were kept.

I want to get these old photos organized before the only people who can
describe their content are gone, plus I'm concerned that they are
susceptible to catastrophic loss at any time. Also, since the family
photos are currently distributed among five or ten older relatives,
probably no one person has actually seen them all. If I can organize
all on CD, I will be able to distribute copies (hopefully with
descriptive narration) to everyone in the family. Another advantage of
this distribution may be to gain additional information on content of
pictures from folks who had not previously seen them.

Anyway, my best estimate is that I'll need to digitize from five to
eight hundred prints of various sizes and conditions. The problem is
exacerbated in that I now live over five hundred miles from the family
hub, so I only get home about three or four times per year. I can't
work on this at my leisure, but must come up with a method having some
reasonable throughput.

Last month, while visiting my family, I borrowed one shoebox full of
old photos from an aunt. Using my Mom's flatbed scanner, I digitized
about a hundred photos over a three-day weekend. I was disappointed
for two reasons:

(1) My throughput was horribly slow. There's first the preview scan,
then the "real" scan, and possibly doing it over if I didn't like the
results.

(2) The quality was disappointing. Perhaps because of the straight-on
direct lighting of the scanner, every little scratch in the photo
surface seemed to be accentuated, and the results actually appeared
more "damaged" than to the naked eye.

As an experiment, I also photographed a few of the old prints using my
Olympus C3000Z, an older 3-megapixel digital point-and-shoot camera. I
used a couple of incandescent lamps, placed off to each side, to get a
more diffuse lighting from about 45 degrees off-center, and no glare.
By illuminating in this manner, I was able to get digitizations that
did not accentuate the surface scratches. The quality of the result
seemed to more closely approximate the original.

So I'm now considering using a digital camera with remote control and
tripod, plus a homemade "cutting board with clips" to hold the photos
flat, instead of a scanner. The camera produces a digital file in
fractions of a second, versus several minutes with a scanner, and the
results seem to be better due to the indirect lighting.

So, what am I sacrificing (other than resolution, unless I buy a better
camera) to gain this speed? I was using scanner settings that resulted
in about 400-1000 dpi (10- to 40-meg bitmap files, depending on scanner
settings and photo size). My current camera will give me about 350 dpi
on a 4x6 print, and I think I might be able to live with that. I think
I can find a zoom setting that results in unnoticeable barrel or
pincushion distortion.

Because my camera is one of the older ones that used smartmedia cards,
I'm limited to 128 MB camera storage (I have two such cards). That
means that I will be switching cards pretty often if I record TIFF
files for future editing. I can also do JPEGs, which will be 700K at
"standard" quality and 1.3 meg at "high" quality (whatever that means).
Any comments on whether a "high" quaility JPEG file might be OK for
post-processing later?

All of my scans were done in full color, rather than grayscale, because
I wanted to preserve the coppery-brown tones of many of these
originals. I'll probably want to continue this, but I'd welcome
opinions here as well.

Also, I have one other 3-MP digital camera, a recently-purchased Canon
S1-IS. This camera doesn't seem to produce the ultimate quality of
shots as my older Olympus, but it does have the advantage of an
evaluative white-balance mode where I could aim it at a sheet of paper
to set the tone. Another advantage it has is 2 Gigabytes of storage on
it's CF card. But I think it has no TIFF mode, just some sort of
Canon-proprietary raw mode. Probably this can be converted, but would
I have to do it one picture at a time? Is there a "batch" converter
available (hopefully shareware) to go from Canon raw file to bitmap or
TIFF? Or should I just stick with the Olympus and use "high" quality
JPEG mode?

Finally, I have read about a scratch-removal package called "digital
ICE", but it seems this is only feasible with transparencies (negatives
or slides). If I'm mistaken, and there is a good way to use this with
prints, I'd like to hear from experienced users.

I'm sure I'm not the first guy who wants to photograph his old prints
instead of scanning, so basically I'm looking for some comments from
folks who have taken this road before.

Martin

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

Martin wrote:
> I'm undertaking a project to archive (and make available on CD) a large
> number of old prints that are currently owned by various older members
> of my extended family. Most of these prints were made from the 1920s
> to the 1960s, and very few negatives were kept.
>
>
> I'm sure I'm not the first guy who wants to photograph his old prints
> instead of scanning, so basically I'm looking for some comments from
> folks who have taken this road before.
>
> Martin
>

I've been working on a similar project. I think that you should rethink
your approach. If your flatbed scanner is set properly, there should be
no specks or other noise on your scanned images. They should be of
better quality than anything you could get with a digital camera. And
they should be of high-enough resolution to enable you to digitally
enhance the images to correct for things like bad exposure (brightness,
contrast, gamma).

You should go to www.scantips.com for a ton of info on the best method
of scanning. That site is a must.

Check to be sure that your scanner is set for no sharpening. If you
have a high sharpness setting, that may account for the specks and noise
in your images.

Apply no color correction or any other type of correction at the time of
the scans. Set your low point at zero, your high point at 255, and your
gamma (midrange) at whatever your scanner manufacturer recommends as normal.

The place to edit the scans is in your editing software, not in your
scanner. Your original scanned images should be saved as TIF tiles (no
compression) and you should consider them as your "digital negatives."
Once you've scanned everything, you can then begin editing COPIES of the
original TIF files. This is where you sharpen, adjust exposure values,
set the high and low points on the histogram dialogue box, adjust for
brightness and contrast, adjust color saturation, etc.

NEVER DELETE OR CHANGE YOUR ORIGINAL SCANNED IMAGES. YOU MAY WISH TO
RE-EDIT THEM YEARS LATER, WHEN BETTER EDITING SOFTWARE MAY BE AVAILABLE.
ALWAYS WORK ONLY ON THE COPIES. I insert the word "EDITED" into the
file name on my working copies to differentiate them from the originals.
I also change the archive bit on the originals to "read-only," to
ensure that I do not delete or change them accidentally.

I keep my ORIGINAL scanned image files on the same disk as the EDITED
copies, to be sure that they do not get separated. Once I've made the
edited copy, I also make a JPG file, at a smaller size, to be used for
viewing on screen. I insert the word "SMALL" in the filename. So I end
up with three copies of each scanned image: the Original unedited scan,
the Edited copy (color-corrected) and the "Small" JPG version. I keep
them in separate directories, each file type in its own directory.

As for keeping track of what is in the photos, I do 2 things:

1: I put the essential info in the file name (i.e.,
John_Smith_Family_Picnic_July_4_1948" ) That is good when searching the
filenames for a particular photo, and it also serves to describe the
photo's contents to anyone viewing it many years from now.

2: I create a text file, listing each photo along with "Who, What,
Where, When, Why" information on each photo. I save the text file on
the CD along with the image files.

There are three other suggestions I can make:

1: Consider adding a border at the bottom of each edited photo, and
adding the descriptive information in that border. That will ensure
that it will NEVER get separated from the image, and anyone wanting to
print the image can simply crop out the border. I would not recommend
adding text in the image itself, do it in a border, where it can be
removed without affecting the image.

2: Don't rely upon image database programs as part of a long-term
archiving project, because operating systems change over time, and your
disks may be unreadable. These types of applications are great for
short term use (i.e., a time horizon of 5 years or less), but if you are
saving for the long haul, a simple text or html file with descriptive
info may be easiest for future generations to read. Also, plan on
migrating your images to future file and media formats as time passes.

3: Consider doing what may be the lowest-tech, and best, solution of
all: making prints of your photos and storing them in an archival album,
along with a copy of the descriptive information. I send my scanned
images to OFOTO and they send me real prints, (silver halide) which I
display in albums. Aside from being great bits of family history, they
have the potential to be "viewable" long after CDs and file formats of
today are no longer in use, if the albums are stored properly. We just
can't foretell what the future might bring. I see it as insurance, and
the photo albums themselves give me much pleasure.

Best of luck.

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

Martin wrote:
> I'm undertaking a project to archive (and make available on CD) a large
> number of old prints that are currently owned by various older members
> of my extended family. Most of these prints were made from the 1920s
> to the 1960s, and very few negatives were kept.
>
> I want to get these old photos organized before the only people who can
> describe their content are gone, plus I'm concerned that they are
> susceptible to catastrophic loss at any time. Also, since the family
> photos are currently distributed among five or ten older relatives,
> probably no one person has actually seen them all. If I can organize
> all on CD, I will be able to distribute copies (hopefully with
> descriptive narration) to everyone in the family. Another advantage of
> this distribution may be to gain additional information on content of
> pictures from folks who had not previously seen them.
>
> Anyway, my best estimate is that I'll need to digitize from five to
> eight hundred prints of various sizes and conditions. The problem is
> exacerbated in that I now live over five hundred miles from the family
> hub, so I only get home about three or four times per year. I can't
> work on this at my leisure, but must come up with a method having some
> reasonable throughput.
>
> Last month, while visiting my family, I borrowed one shoebox full of
> old photos from an aunt. Using my Mom's flatbed scanner, I digitized
> about a hundred photos over a three-day weekend. I was disappointed
> for two reasons:
>
> (1) My throughput was horribly slow. There's first the preview scan,
> then the "real" scan, and possibly doing it over if I didn't like the
> results.
>
> (2) The quality was disappointing. Perhaps because of the straight-on
> direct lighting of the scanner, every little scratch in the photo
> surface seemed to be accentuated, and the results actually appeared
> more "damaged" than to the naked eye.
>
> As an experiment, I also photographed a few of the old prints using my
> Olympus C3000Z, an older 3-megapixel digital point-and-shoot camera. I
> used a couple of incandescent lamps, placed off to each side, to get a
> more diffuse lighting from about 45 degrees off-center, and no glare.
> By illuminating in this manner, I was able to get digitizations that
> did not accentuate the surface scratches. The quality of the result
> seemed to more closely approximate the original.
>
> So I'm now considering using a digital camera with remote control and
> tripod, plus a homemade "cutting board with clips" to hold the photos
> flat, instead of a scanner. The camera produces a digital file in
> fractions of a second, versus several minutes with a scanner, and the
> results seem to be better due to the indirect lighting.
>
> So, what am I sacrificing (other than resolution, unless I buy a better
> camera) to gain this speed? I was using scanner settings that resulted
> in about 400-1000 dpi (10- to 40-meg bitmap files, depending on scanner
> settings and photo size). My current camera will give me about 350 dpi
> on a 4x6 print, and I think I might be able to live with that. I think
> I can find a zoom setting that results in unnoticeable barrel or
> pincushion distortion.
>
> Because my camera is one of the older ones that used smartmedia cards,
> I'm limited to 128 MB camera storage (I have two such cards). That
> means that I will be switching cards pretty often if I record TIFF
> files for future editing. I can also do JPEGs, which will be 700K at
> "standard" quality and 1.3 meg at "high" quality (whatever that means).
> Any comments on whether a "high" quaility JPEG file might be OK for
> post-processing later?
>
> All of my scans were done in full color, rather than grayscale, because
> I wanted to preserve the coppery-brown tones of many of these
> originals. I'll probably want to continue this, but I'd welcome
> opinions here as well.
>
> Also, I have one other 3-MP digital camera, a recently-purchased Canon
> S1-IS. This camera doesn't seem to produce the ultimate quality of
> shots as my older Olympus, but it does have the advantage of an
> evaluative white-balance mode where I could aim it at a sheet of paper
> to set the tone. Another advantage it has is 2 Gigabytes of storage on
> it's CF card. But I think it has no TIFF mode, just some sort of
> Canon-proprietary raw mode. Probably this can be converted, but would
> I have to do it one picture at a time? Is there a "batch" converter
> available (hopefully shareware) to go from Canon raw file to bitmap or
> TIFF? Or should I just stick with the Olympus and use "high" quality
> JPEG mode?
>
> Finally, I have read about a scratch-removal package called "digital
> ICE", but it seems this is only feasible with transparencies (negatives
> or slides). If I'm mistaken, and there is a good way to use this with
> prints, I'd like to hear from experienced users.
>
> I'm sure I'm not the first guy who wants to photograph his old prints
> instead of scanning, so basically I'm looking for some comments from
> folks who have taken this road before.
>
> Martin
>
I think you can get better results consistantly with a scanner than with a camera. For
one thing, you can easily be off-focus witha camera, and not know it until you have time
to look at the images. Others have suggested ways to increase scanner throughput, and I
have nothing to add. But you will surely want to do some image processing of the scans or
photos, and I recommend Paint Shop Pro. It has a one-click set of apps that work very
well for me on about 80% to 90% of my photos and scans, and you can come up with your own
set of steps if you prefer. You can do it as a batch operation on several images at once.
And PSP does a very nice job of correcting fading and browning in old photos, both B/W
and color.

It is a matter of taste, but I prefer to correct the brownish color of aged photos, to get
closer to how the photos looked originally. But always keep the unmodified image files.

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

David,

My limited reading seemed to imply that the digital-ICE process
depended on the media being transmissive to infrared, so that it could
pick up the scratches and dust in a separate scan from the image data.
This seems generally incompatible with a "positive", ie a print, since
it isn't transparent to anything. What am I missing?

Martin

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

Martin Brown wrote:

<snip>

> I would be interested in any tricks that help with copying prints on
> rough pearly paper that catch the light in annoying ways.

Hi Martin...

Scanned a few of those for my young neighbor... pictures
of her and her sister when she was about two - she'd be
thirty-five-ish now, so I guess 33 year old prints.

Got pretty good results. Scan them on your flatbed; then
rotate the print 180 degrees and scan again. Rotate one,
layer one on top of the other at 50% transparency and it
looks pretty good.

Tried 4 scans too, each at 90 degrees and 25%, but couldn't
get the alignment dead on. You may have better luck, worth
a try.

Take care.

Ken

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

Martin wrote:
> I'm undertaking a project to archive (and make available on CD) a large
> number of old prints that are currently owned by various older members
> of my extended family. Most of these prints were made from the 1920s
> to the 1960s, and very few negatives were kept.
>
> I want to get these old photos organized before the only people who can
> describe their content are gone, plus I'm concerned that they are
> susceptible to catastrophic loss at any time. Also, since the family
> photos are currently distributed among five or ten older relatives,
> probably no one person has actually seen them all. If I can organize
> all on CD, I will be able to distribute copies (hopefully with
> descriptive narration) to everyone in the family. Another advantage of
> this distribution may be to gain additional information on content of
> pictures from folks who had not previously seen them.
>
> Anyway, my best estimate is that I'll need to digitize from five to
> eight hundred prints of various sizes and conditions. The problem is
> exacerbated in that I now live over five hundred miles from the family
> hub, so I only get home about three or four times per year. I can't
> work on this at my leisure, but must come up with a method having some
> reasonable throughput.
>
> Last month, while visiting my family, I borrowed one shoebox full of
> old photos from an aunt. Using my Mom's flatbed scanner, I digitized
> about a hundred photos over a three-day weekend. I was disappointed
> for two reasons:
>
> (1) My throughput was horribly slow. There's first the preview scan,
> then the "real" scan, and possibly doing it over if I didn't like the
> results.
>
> (2) The quality was disappointing. Perhaps because of the straight-on
> direct lighting of the scanner, every little scratch in the photo
> surface seemed to be accentuated, and the results actually appeared
> more "damaged" than to the naked eye.
>
> As an experiment, I also photographed a few of the old prints using my
> Olympus C3000Z, an older 3-megapixel digital point-and-shoot camera. I
> used a couple of incandescent lamps, placed off to each side, to get a
> more diffuse lighting from about 45 degrees off-center, and no glare.
> By illuminating in this manner, I was able to get digitizations that
> did not accentuate the surface scratches. The quality of the result
> seemed to more closely approximate the original.
>
> So I'm now considering using a digital camera with remote control and
> tripod, plus a homemade "cutting board with clips" to hold the photos
> flat, instead of a scanner. The camera produces a digital file in
> fractions of a second, versus several minutes with a scanner, and the
> results seem to be better due to the indirect lighting.
>
> So, what am I sacrificing (other than resolution, unless I buy a better
> camera) to gain this speed? I was using scanner settings that resulted
> in about 400-1000 dpi (10- to 40-meg bitmap files, depending on scanner
> settings and photo size). My current camera will give me about 350 dpi
> on a 4x6 print, and I think I might be able to live with that. I think
> I can find a zoom setting that results in unnoticeable barrel or
> pincushion distortion.
>
> Because my camera is one of the older ones that used smartmedia cards,
> I'm limited to 128 MB camera storage (I have two such cards). That
> means that I will be switching cards pretty often if I record TIFF
> files for future editing. I can also do JPEGs, which will be 700K at
> "standard" quality and 1.3 meg at "high" quality (whatever that means).
> Any comments on whether a "high" quaility JPEG file might be OK for
> post-processing later?
>
> All of my scans were done in full color, rather than grayscale, because
> I wanted to preserve the coppery-brown tones of many of these
> originals. I'll probably want to continue this, but I'd welcome
> opinions here as well.
>
> Also, I have one other 3-MP digital camera, a recently-purchased Canon
> S1-IS. This camera doesn't seem to produce the ultimate quality of
> shots as my older Olympus, but it does have the advantage of an
> evaluative white-balance mode where I could aim it at a sheet of paper
> to set the tone. Another advantage it has is 2 Gigabytes of storage on
> it's CF card. But I think it has no TIFF mode, just some sort of
> Canon-proprietary raw mode. Probably this can be converted, but would
> I have to do it one picture at a time? Is there a "batch" converter
> available (hopefully shareware) to go from Canon raw file to bitmap or
> TIFF? Or should I just stick with the Olympus and use "high" quality
> JPEG mode?
>
> Finally, I have read about a scratch-removal package called "digital
> ICE", but it seems this is only feasible with transparencies (negatives
> or slides). If I'm mistaken, and there is a good way to use this with
> prints, I'd like to hear from experienced users.
>
> I'm sure I'm not the first guy who wants to photograph his old prints
> instead of scanning, so basically I'm looking for some comments from
> folks who have taken this road before.
>
> Martin
>
First, you might try this website: www.scantips.com

Second, a good quality scanner on a USB 2 interface should help your
scanning speed a great deal, but taking a photo with a good digital
camera will still be much faster, albeit at a loss of resolution. Use
the camera with the best resolution, and retire the Smartmedia camera to
a backup role as storage is inadequate for your needs.

A good, but inexpensive, solution to working on damaged photos is
Photoshop Elements 3.0, which will also help you organize your photos
after you get them digitized.

Either approach is going to be quite a major project. Good luck.


--
Ron Hunter rphunter@charter.net

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

On Film wrote:
> On 30 Aug 2005 09:30:26 -0700, "Martin" <funkychateauSPAM@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>> I believe I can get them square to start with, by having a small
>> "ledge" on my holding board so that each photo at least has it's
>> horizontal bottom oriented the same as the last. Actually, I have
>> a
>> much, much, harder time keeping things square on a scanner glass.
>> The old photos all have some curling, and they shift around when
>> you
>> close the scanner cover.
>>>
>
> A 'holding board' can be easily constructed that will hold all but
> the
> most recalcitrant curlies.
>
> Use a piece of index or light weight card stock, apply some strips
> of
> something that will stick, such as double faced carpet tape or 3M
> transfer adhesive. To those adhesive areas apply Post-It Label and
> Cover-up tape with the tacky side out. That will give you a
> slightly
> tacky area on which to position the photo. That should hold it in
> place for you to position on the scanner.This is also a good
> technique
> to hold print in position when making copies by camera.
>
> I am in a similar project to archive family photos and was glad that
> you posed your question. I have learned a lot from the responses.

I got a piece of bare perforated circuit board, used it to cap a box
with a muffin fan sealed in to create a vacuum, rheostat in the power
line. It held most photos flat enough without interfering with the
information face. Unfortunately I thought it up when the job was 90%
done.

All but the last 10% was done with a copy stand, enlarger platform (I
can't for the life of me remember what the frame with a pivoting glass
top and foam backing is called; you know, the one that holds the paper
while you expose it?), stamina and persistence. Yes, it was worth it,
even though I did it (am doing it) a second time with a good scanner.

--
Frank ess

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

Colin D wrote:
> Martin wrote:
> >
> > All of my scans were done in full color, rather than grayscale, because
> > I wanted to preserve the coppery-brown tones of many of these
> > originals. I'll probably want to continue this, but I'd welcome
> > opinions here as well.
>
> There is another advantage to shooting in color. Many old prints are
> showing yellowing where the image is degrading. However, the blue
> channel sees yellow as dark, and using only the blue channel when
> editing the image can render faded parts practically invisible.
> >

Colin,

How, typically, do you "use only the blue channel" for grayscale
luminance? My editing software is "Ulead Photoimpact".

thanks,

Martin

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

Martin wrote:
>
> Colin D wrote:
> > Martin wrote:
> > >
> > > All of my scans were done in full color, rather than grayscale, because
> > > I wanted to preserve the coppery-brown tones of many of these
> > > originals. I'll probably want to continue this, but I'd welcome
> > > opinions here as well.
> >
> > There is another advantage to shooting in color. Many old prints are
> > showing yellowing where the image is degrading. However, the blue
> > channel sees yellow as dark, and using only the blue channel when
> > editing the image can render faded parts practically invisible.
> > >
>
> Colin,
>
> How, typically, do you "use only the blue channel" for grayscale
> luminance? My editing software is "Ulead Photoimpact".
>
Ahh, I use Photoshop, and that program allows one to separate and
view/convert the image to any combination of R,G,or B channels, and to
vary the relative amounts of each.

If you drop out the R and G channels, you are left with only the blue,
which is what I use with faded b/w copies.

I can't say whether Ulead has this capability, perhaps someone could
clarify for you. Alternatively, maybe you could pick up an earlier
version of Photoshop, say 6 or 7, for not much cash.

Good luck with your enterprise,

Colin D.

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

-hh wrote:
>
> > Second, a good quality scanner on a USB 2 interface should help your
> > scanning speed a great deal...
>
> Using Firewire instead of USB 2 will tend to boost throughput by
> another 25-33%. They're not as easy to find, nor quite as cheap, but
> "every little bit helps". Epson's website has refurbs of their
> "Perfection 3200 Photo" model, which has both ports.
>
Have you got actual experience of firewire being faster than usb with
the same peripheral? Specs are firewire tops out at 400 Mb/sec, and usb
2.0 at 480 Mb/sec. I don't believe FW is a third faster than usb 2.

Colin D.