How to copy some very very old photos?

[jcarter]

My family is off rafting the Colorado again, so I decided to go thru some old boxes of 'stuff'.
Found some really old photos of Woods Hole.

My father in law worked at www.whoi.edu (as the rest of us did), and he saved this box of old photos.
I know they would be very very much wanted by the historical guys there.

So I would love to scan them and put them up on my site full sized, but I have read that the scanner light is too bright for really old photos.
I could photo each one with my iPhone in the kitchen out of direct sunlight instead?
What do you suggest.
Jane

[Xairbusdriver]

Most/many scanners have at least 'brightness' and 'contrast' controls. They should be usable in Image Capture, even if you don't have proprietary scanner software. You probably don't actually control the luminosity of the light source, anyway. The scanner will simply computationally reduce the brightness in the output file.

Taking a picture of a picture with almost any camera and certainly a phone's will probably be half the resolution your scanner can provide. With a good scanner, that phone camera may well be only a quarter of the resolution! Plus, it will be next to impossible to get rid of parallax distortion, camera shake, consistent positioning, etc., etc..

What does "full-size" mean? Pixel dimensions? Inches? What is the resolution of the monitor? How many different monitor sizes to you figure there are?

[jcarter]

Thats good news!  I was afraid that the bright light could damage them.
I will copy them with my scanner probably tomorrow.
Im not sure what the resolutions and all the specs are, as Ive not started this project yet.
But everything that I do with this new Canon comes out extremely well.
Thank you!

I actually have a lot more to work on, but will save a lot of that for the wintertime.

I usually use PS or Elements, but one of my classmates said that the new Lightroom is really wonderful.
I probably will buy it.

[Xairbusdriver]

QUOTE

Im not sure what the resolutions and all the specs are

They will be whatever you set them to be in the scanner. Real photographs weren't usually concerned with 'resolution' the way we talk about it. Their "pixels" required a very strong magnifying glass or microscope to see the silver crystals!

Mavericks security features (sandboxing) no longer allows third-party apps to use parts of the scanning API's that would allow the user to select a location to save scans. That's one reason why I use Image Capture. Also, IC is extremely lightweight compared to the resources loaded by Elements/PS (and probably even more so compared to Lightroom). I don't bother opening anything in Elements until I've done some basic examination of the images I'm about to work on. That's probably because I'm such a bad photographer! Anyway, I now open most images in the RAW editor to get the exposures all as close to the same and adjust the blacks/whites to avoid blowouts and black blobs (sorry for those technical terms ).    

I don't think Adobe even includes TWAIN tools for PSE 10, 11 or 12. Don't really need those anymore.

Good luck on your scanning! I'm sure the folks at the Institute will appreciate your work!

[jcarter]

I did have problems using the scanner with my new Mac, figured it was that the TWAIN wouldn't work.
So I use VueScan which does the job, tho not as versatile as the old way.
I can set it the way I want, and will give Image Capture a try too.

Hope I get the chance to do this tomorrow morning.
Thanks again,
Jane

[krissel]

Use one that isn't as important as a test to see which scanner settings give you the best result. Most software will let you prescan and bring up the image where you can try out different adjustments before the actual scan to file.

I've scanned a lot of black and white photos my grandfather took in the 1920's and some from even earlier. They all came out fine with no problems and the originals showed no effect.

[jcarter]

Yes, ViewScan will let me do that too. But its sure not like the old software where you could scan right with PS or Elements. I sure miss that.
And I will photoshop them too if they need it.

I will do the slides this winter, no time for them now, just will do the prints.

[jcarter]

Just wanted to let you know, my Canon using VueScan is working just beautifully!
Some of the pictures are in the mid 1930s, mostly of Woods Hole, MA.

[jcarter]

Heavens, now a box of old coins, mostly from Korea and probably Beirut.

Boxes of really old paper money too, mostly from travels on the research ships from my husband and his dad.
And other family members. It all ended up here in our attic.
It would be fun to scan some of the old paper money, some is really really old. (I have an old version of Elements which lets me scan money.)
Or make a glass topped table out of it, no, it would fade.

[Paddy]

QUOTE(jcarter @ Jul 1 2014, 11:19 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Heavens, now a box of old coins, mostly from Korea and probably Beirut.

Boxes of really old paper money too, mostly from travels on the research ships from my husband and his dad.
And other family members. It all ended up here in our attic.
It would be fun to scan some of the old paper money, some is really really old. (I have an old version of Elements which lets me scan money.)
Or make a glass topped table out of it, no, it would fade.

Actually, money probably wouldn't fade much - it's usually made to withstand all sorts of abuse and the inks are pretty good.

VueScan is at least as capable, if not more so, than many scanning programs that come with scanners. You can make all sorts of adjustments with it. Then, if you need more (ie: dust removal, scratch removal etc.) open the image in Photoshop.

You will want to scan at 300 dpi or 600 dpi for best results. It won't get any sharper with a higher dpi.

See: http://www.scantips.com/basics08.html - in fact, take a look at the whole site, as it's got good info: http://www.scantips.com

[jcarter]

Thats a great site!  I probably will have a lot of work to do with Photoshop for these old pictures, some are torn. I did take a class in photo restoration. So will go back and look at my lessons and my classwork.

Using 300dpi at the moment.

Ive got an amazing shell collection(sea shells not the other kind), and tons of really old paper money from everywhere, so perhaps that will be a project for my husband next winter.  A friend of mine did her kitchen and diningroom with old nautical charts. And we have tons of those too, as once the research ships got new ones, they gave some of the old ones to my husband, his dad, and me.

[Xairbusdriver]

QUOTE

I have an old version of Elements which lets me scan money.

Image Capture will scan money with no problem. The problem with money is that PS/Elements/etc. won't let you edit an image of any bank note (at least the ones they recognize). GIMP apparently does not have this built-in barrier. But my new scanner has no barriers and IC used it to capture an image just fine.

Of course, you can't open it in Elements. Not directly, but you can open it in the RAW editor. But as soon as you  ask to then open it in Elements, you will get the warning.

The 'trick is to simply scan and save the image as a PDF. Once you have that PS/Elements/etc. will happily open the PDF and you can do any desired editing and save it in whatever format you app allows. You can set the pixel dimensions by setting the resolution in the scanner. Then you can display at any appropriate size by changing either the ppi or directly by using width/hight values.

IC 'sees' the capabilities of any scanner you tell it about in the Print & Scan Prefs. If your scanner can 'Descreen' it's in a drop down menu. Dust removal, same thing. 'Manual Color Correction' allows Brightness, Tint, Temperature and Saturation sliders.

Of course, in Mavericks, the only way to assign a different location (Scan To:) for saving the image file is to use IC directly. A third-party app, like PDF Pro, can access all the other controls and settings but not change the OS directed storage location. I tend to scan several items at a time and work on editing them later and may not even use all of them. So I don't want or need Elements to open with all the scanned images right away. Different work flows for different folk... assuming you don't want the best one... MINE!

Oh yeah, IC is free, it has come with every OS X for at least 10 years. Well de-bugged!

[jcarter]

I have used IC, it is pretty nice, I was unaware of it till fairly recently.

I will try some of the things you mention here, as sometimes I get into a rut using only PS and PSE.

So many things to use that do almost the same thing, and how to sort them all out to do the best for each task!
I probably dont need LightRoom, but Im going to buy it anyway, and take the lessons and the videos for it.

[Sooz]

Hi, Jane,

I wanted to copy some old photos, too, and put them into one of those books you can get printed up online as gifts one year.  

I scanned some but then quickly realized how time consuming it was, and I'd have to do some photo restoration-type work to get rid of the dust, the other issues, like the torn parts or folded lines in some of the photos, using PhotoShop. That quickly became tedious.  I cleaned the scanner, I used canned air on the photos, but no luck at getting rid of what looked like dust.

I decided to then use my Nikon SLR camera or my Sony Cyber-shot camera, and a light box I made, and took a photo of the photos I wanted to use. I had the cameras set on the best setting possible, and from there, the photos I downloaded didn't have all that much to clean up and the resolution looked really good!  

Here are a couple of photos of photos of my dad--done with the Sony Cyber-shot.  One clearly shows 1937 on it, and the other, as near as I can tell, is from about 1924. You can see the white edge of the original photo in the 1924 picture, and a "spot" that I would have removed with PS, but I ended up not using the picture. In the 1937 photo, you can see the white edge at the top of the photo has some discoloration. When I uploaded this photo to the book-in-progress, I just cropped it out.

Hope your photos come out great, however you do them!

Smiles,
Sooz