Comments | rdhdsnippet: Ask archival el-jay

rdhdsnippet

Ask archival el-jay

Aug 20, 2011 11:38

Maybe the hive can help...

I'm scanning old family photos, and I have three questions about the process, from a technical standpoint. And oh-by-the-way, I am working on a Mac. Though I could move much of the process to a PC if you gave me a ghost of a reason I needed to, as the scanner is wireless ( Read more... )

ask dr. el-jay

Comments 23

A few suggestions (as always, Your mileage may vary) musicman August 20 2011, 16:22:12 UTC

Unless you are planning to blow those snapshots up to wall size, 300dpi is normally sufficient for crisp photos. Most snapshots are not going to sustain being blown up larger. If you have the negatives, scan those at 2400dpi at 100% and use those to then make larger prints is more than fine. However, a TIFF image is just going to create a huge image that is difficult to use in many programs - why not save as JPG and then always do a save-as for the image, in which case you don't lose much. The speed of your scan is going to be about 10x faster and you'll actually get more done that way ( ... )

Re: A few suggestions (as always, Your mileage may vary) rdhdsnippet August 20 2011, 17:05:51 UTC

No, I wouldn't really want to blow them up particularly, I just want some random family member to have a good enough file that if they send it off to get printed, they get back a 3x5 snapshot that's roughly the same quality, to the naked eye, as the one I scanned in ( ... )

Re: A few suggestions (as always, Your mileage may vary) musicman August 20 2011, 17:13:53 UTC

You do need a special film scanner, that is true to do negatives. I bought an Epson scanner that is pretty good compromise for price, and it does amazing scans of film negatives and transparencies.

redhotlips August 20 2011, 16:29:55 UTC

1. It adds the extra mgs because it's creating an instruction file associated with it, to instruct to turn the image. If you were to use Lightroom3 that file would be smaller, and you may not need to rotate them at all. Some scanners (depending on what scanner you have) have an option where you can set which side is "top" - usually in the scanner settings menu ( ... )

rdhdsnippet August 20 2011, 16:56:33 UTC

1. I guess that makes sense. I could certainly orient the photos differently, but was taking advantage of the fact that the scanner is smart enough to separate different snapshots into different files and do them four at a time. I guess I can live with the file size bloat as long as it's not doing anything else weird ( ... )

musicman August 20 2011, 16:38:01 UTC

GraphicCoverter is a mac app that is low cost, and will allow you to add EXIF or File info data to the images to travel with the images. It is also super at converting existing files from one format to another, opens nearly anything out there, and can also be used to control a wide variety of post productions (though is not as good as photoshop). A download of it is relatively inexpensive.

rdhdsnippet August 20 2011, 17:06:43 UTC

Having forgotten to mention I have Lightroom and Photoshop, is there any reason to look into that in addition?

Two thumbs up for Photoshop and Lightroom musicman August 20 2011, 17:17:34 UTC

If you have those, no need for the other. You have all you need right there. If you know how to use Lightroom, that is the best way, it does not add much memory to save in various formats, rotate, etc. since it basically just saves instruction packages and settings in a command file and then uses those to print or show the images.

I suggest scanning negs at higher than 1200 dpi, however, I have a lot of experience at that and I don't think 1200 is sufficient.

nminusone August 20 2011, 17:16:22 UTC

When picking a scanning dpi you might consider how big the prints are. If one print was blown up twice as large as another you can scan it at half the resolution and get a similar end result. Throwing away extra data is way easier than recovering data you never had, and disk is awesomely cheap.

It's probably true that anything above 600dpi is overkill for today's technology, but printers will only get better and cheaper as time goes on. Circa 1990 my workplace had a color photo printer that did 8x10s. It took 2 strong people to lift and cost $25k. Who knows what another 20 years of technology will bring?

rdhdsnippet August 20 2011, 17:53:57 UTC

This, my friend, is exactly the argument I've been making, but you did it much more succinctly! If only there were a way to scan as 1200dpi that didn't take six years.

nminusone August 20 2011, 20:19:57 UTC

This sounds like a job for child labor! (I was thinking of someone else's child, honest. Maybe a teen who wants some extra cash?)

beowabbit August 20 2011, 17:37:41 UTC

Unfortunately, none of my experience is Mac or Windows; it’s all Linux-specific.

However, I do have a suggestion that might smooth your workflow a bit: I have a dedicated photo scanner that records to an SD card (or USB flash drive, I think; I haven’t tried that). So you don't need to hook it up to a computer; you just sit and feed photos into it (one at a time, so they can be oriented differently if you like) and you end up with a memory card with each photo in its own file (mine does fairly high-quality JPEG). If you’re doing a lot of photos, the time saved fiddling with the scanner lid, orienting the photos on the glass, and so on, plus the ability to scan things at your coffeetable or kitchen table away from a computer, might be a sufficient time savings to be worth the purchase. The one I have is a Pandigital PhotoLink One-Touch Scanner; I think the one I have is the SCN02 model. It only does up to 4"x6", but there are other similar gadgets if you want to scan 8½"x11". Probably wouldn’t be good for newspaper clippings or ( ... )