Some answers inserted below:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tomasz Zakrzewski" <tomzakrz@ka.onet.pl>
To: <filmscanners@halftone.co.uk>
Sent: Monday, July 23, 2001 7:02 PM
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?
If you have the storage space on CD or otherwise, yes. If not, it is not
necessary - scan in 16 bit, do perhaps basic corrections, convert to 8-bit
and save. I would save them at 1200dpi if possible, though.
| Do I need the same for b&w prints?
I would suggest scanning and saving them in color, especially since you
mention below that the old paper is not showing a color cast. You may well
find that one or more of the channels have better detail, contrast,
luminosity etc. than others. See Chapter 13 of Dan Margulis's Professional
Photoshop 5 or 6. See
<
ion=Display&ARTICLE_ID=70917&KEYWORD=dan%20margulis>
| 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?
Stretch them from 0 to 255 for purposes of saving to disk.
