Re: Archiving Old (Antique) Prints - Scan VS Photograph (long discussion)
- From: Martin Brown <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 16:53:50 +0100
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.
IME the oldest images tend to be fairly small ones - contact prints off 21/4" negatives or postcard 6x4 for the most part.
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.
Not a bad idea. Worth capturing the descriptions as well as any hand written noes lurking on the back.
Anyway, my best estimate is that I'll need to digitize from five to
eight hundred prints of various sizes and conditions.
Archive them as whole A4 scans with as many as will fit in one scan if you are using a flatbed scanner and unless they have exceptional detail scan at 300 to maybe 600 dpi. I save as PNG which is losslessly compressed.
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.
Worth learning post processing to sort out minor dynamic range faults. Bad scans can look much better after suitable adjustments. Although for optimum quality you need to rescan correctly.
(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.
You may be scanning with more resolution than the original image quality can stand. This tends to emphasise all defects.
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 have used this method with material that was too fragile to risk putting on a flat bed. Works quite well with a 6Mpixel SLR and is relatively quick to do - once you are set up with even lighting and all square. But then you need more post processing to square things up exactly. It is surprisingly difficult to get every last one on square.
And beware of unintended tripod leg reflections on glossy prints!
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.
Try flat bed scanning with comparable resolution to the digcam.
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.
Even if it isn't perfect these days most image processing packages can tweak lens geometry errors out.
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?
High quality JPEG at roughly 1.5MB for a 3Mpixel camera seldom gives me any bother unless the shot is wildly undereexposed.
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.
I'd keep the 24 bit colour mode on since you can trade a bit of the colour sensor data for increased grayscale resolution later on.
Finally, I have read about a scratch-removal package called "digital
ICE", but it seems this is only feasible with transparencies (negatives
or slides).
Worse still it is only any good with dye based images. It goes crazy if you feed in a silver photo negative (which is a pity).
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.
It is useful for fragile material, but flat bed should be capable of working well enough if you get the hang of it. You may be able to force the scanner to scan and save the whole A4 region with a bit of cunning.
I would be interested in any tricks that help with copying prints on rough pearly paper that catch the light in annoying ways.
Regards, Martin Brown .
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