Re: Archiving Old (Antique) Prints - Scan VS Photograph (long discussion)

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 *** 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.
.

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