What settings to scan old photos in black & white ?
My mother dug out some old photos of family that are in black & white, from the 1940's & 1950's World War II era, most are fairly small, about 4 x 6 or 5 x 7, with a few bigger.
I have an Epson perfection photo 4490 flatbed scanner, that I am using with Photoshop CS5, & Elements 6.0 I am scanning & saving them in .tiff format. some questions about settings what resolution should I use? I want a printable resolution for printing as well as for uploading to the internet, mom likes to upload some of these to her facebook page. what color? or should I use color or one of the grey scales options? there is 8, & 16 bit grey scales. A note; In the past, I had some greyscale scans & tried to open them up in windows explore, on a computer running windows xp home, & it could not open them, so I thought for best compatibility, I would stick with color even though the images are in black & white. so what would be the best for platform computer compatibility? for older & newer macs & windows computers? color or grey scale? if I use color, I thought since they are black & white, that I could use 24 bit color in sRGB color space, I would not need advanced color & bit depth since they are black & white, is this good? once I have scanned them in & open them in Photoshop, what would be the best image enhancers? like brightening them up, removing color cast etc. |
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I just finished restoring several 1930s and 1950s images. I didn't do B&W, because these were already sepia. I did change it to a copper sepia, however, which looks much more classy that a dingy yellow shade. I think you know Photoshop well enough to know where most of these tools/features are located. If not, just ask a followup question in this thread, and I'll grab a few quick screen caps for you. Enjoy the project -- photography should be fun. :) |
Yes, a few screen caps of where those B&W filters & other tools you mentioned would be helpful, & the order in which tools to use in the workflow. Is auto tone good? so far, after I had the photos scanned, I just brought them into Photoshop, & used the auto tone feature, or used the levels palette to adjust brightness contrast.
which is better to use those little palettes on the side for adjustments? or use the auto features from the dropdown menus at the top of the screen, like auto tone, auto contrast etc. I read that some photographers use something called vue scan & do their scans in DNG or RAW files. Do I need to do this? or is .tiff good? is vue scan good? should I get & use it with my scanner? right now I am using the Epson scan software that came with my Epson scanner, to do the scans & then I do all the color, healing ect in Photoshop, is this a good workflow? |
RAW or DNG (digital negative) would be massive overkill for what you want to do. It creates large files that are harder to work with, especially for a novice. That's generally intended for use with scanning film anyway, not prints.
VueScan isn't really that good, in my opinion -- it's not even close to the quality of Silverfast. But Silverfast only works with specific scanners, like the higher-end Nikon 35mm film/slide scanner I have, and it costs more. VueScan is more of a general scanning tool, and is more newbie friendly, at consumer prices. (I vaguely remember VueScan being the software that came for free with some scanners, in the early 2000s, but I'm not 100% sure on that. It's been too long.) The Epson scanning software is plenty good. I use it for my Epson flatbed scanners. I don't know that VueScan implements all of the noise reduction filters found in Epson flatbeds, so VueScan might even be a worse choice for a good Epson flatbed. TIFF is excellent. (Even a 'Highest' JPEG would be "good enough".) I'll often tweak colors a bit in the Epson software first, to improve it as much as possible without over-correction, and then fine tweak it in Photoshop or Lightroom afterwards. In Photoshop --
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I found a good discussion at the RangeFinder forum, where people are discussing and comparing VueScan to Epson and Silverfast. The overwhelming opinion there seems to be that Epson software works best on Epson scanners (including the Epson 4990 and V700), and VueScan is prone to various problems -- misaligned film/slides, color casts, etc. And then it has a 1990s quality GUI that makes it annoying to use, unlike the user-friendly Epson GUI.
So t sum it up: VueScan sucks for Epson scanners. :2cents: |
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thanks for the link, it is going to have to be the Epson scan, as I cant really afford more expensive software now anyways. it looks like I am on the right track, but a rundown of which adjustment settings to use in what order & where they are in Photoshop would be helpful. when I was scanning in my audio cd album art, I often used auto tone, auto color, & auto contrast, was this ok for theses type of scans? well I guess it does not matter so much now, I have scanned in nearly all my audio cd album art, & I am not going back, I just dont have time, so i guess it will have to be good enough. On a side note, I do notice that when I am adjusting the crop boundary box in either Epson scan or Photoshop, the fans will spin up more on my mac laptop, & the boundary box will sort of "stick or get stuck for a few moments, there is a momentary general hang, until the fans spin down, & I can finish adjusting the boundary box. I have 4gb of ram in my mac laptop, & it can get take more, up to 8 gigs, but I know nothing of installing mac parts, as I have come to this mac after several years on a Dell windows pc desktop, so I am still a newish mac user. I am scared of doing anything like that, & the old saying of if it is not broken dont fix it comes to mind. |
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But there's also issues where the computer is simply confused. I tend to reboot before scanning, even on a Mac. Contrary to Mac fanboys of the world, Macs crash, and quite often. In the past month alone, Windows XP has crashed maybe twice (once each on two computers), while OS X 10.6 has crashed at least three times with vague errors or outright lockups. |
Since Photoshop color use is a somewhat new/different topic than scanning, I've moved the Photoshop B&W color correction posts here:
See http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/phot...ert-color.html Thanks. :) |
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