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



Martin wrote:
>
<snip>

> 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.

That sounds like you were using an older scanner, a Mustek or similar.
Newer scanners don't need a prescan, and the lighting isn't too bad for
surface irregularities. You would be better to spend any money on a
scanner rather than a camera, though the camera would be useful later
on. I would try Ebay for a scanner, say a HP 5200 or better.
>
> 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.

It can be difficult to get lighting as even from 45 degree lights as
with a scanner's internal lighting. You really need four lights, one at
each corner, set up so the fall-off from each is cancelled by the
others. Tricky with large prints, say 6x8 or 8x10.
>
> 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?

The down-time associated with loading images from the card into the
computer can offset the increased time to use a flat-bed scanner,
specially if you place as many prints as you can on the glass at once,
and then saw them up later in PS or PSP, which is what I did with the
extended family's print collection, about 3-400 prints.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?

I would recommend a better camera, at least 6MP for good results, but
they're not cheap.
>
> 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
.

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