PSP/ Photoshop Monitor

[OhThatGirl2001]

Greetings,

This is my very first time posting. I'm very new to this and have a question. I use both PSP 7 and Photoshop 6. My question is: I have been scanning some very old photographs 50-60 years old. I've noticed that when I open the photo in PSP the image is even more faded then the original. I have calibrated my monitor through PSP 7. The very same image looks brighter/ almost too bright in contrast in Photoshop. Any suggestions?

Also, does anyone have experience with scanning matted photos? I find the raised areas have a blue fleck tint after being scanned. Of course I can convert to grayscale, but I prefer scanning in 16 million colors to begin with.

Lisa

[DJ Dubovsky]

Welcome to Retouch Pro Lisa. I don't know that much about PSP 7 but I had the same problem with my old scanner image program. Images looked almost ghostly to what they appeared on Photoshop. I believe you may have the programs set to different gammas or when you set your monitor to PSP 7 it was a different monitor gamma setting than Photoshop has. Others may know more about this subject than I do.

As for matted photos seems to be a trouble spot for most members here and they have talked about it on other threads. Although I'm not so sure a straight forward answer ever came about except maybe taking a picture of it with a digital camera instead of scanning it. That's usually not an option for most people. There are some software on the market that helps take out patterns such as that. You might look through the fourm and see what you can find. If I can find them I will post a link here for you.
DJ

[DJ Dubovsky]

Lisa
Click on this link. It's a forum thread on pattern removal with links and photo files of some pretty impressive software.

Another software that works for pattern removal is called Forvea Pro and you can check that out here
DJ

[Tim_S]

Lisa,

I'm neither a Mac person, nor a PSP so take what I say with a grain of salt...

You say that when you look at them in PSP they are more faded than the original. How are you scanning your photos? Is there a separate program used by the scanner that saves your pictures as files that you later open in PSP, or are you scanning directly in to PSP or PS7? What I'm trying to get at is, do the photos ever look right on the screen?

If not, the first suspect is the brightness and contrast settings of your monitor. Go to .
www.aim-dtp.net/aim/calibration/index.htm
and select Setting the Brightness and Contrast from the menu, and follow the directions to set your brightness and contrast.

If that doesn't correct it I'd suspect the scan settings. Will your scanner allow you to control black and white points, curves etc? Are you adjusting these to optimize the scan? Are you using Brightness and Contrast controls in the scan software to adjust the tone of the photo (dont!)?

If on the other hand, the pictures look OK on screen when viewed with an uncalibrated picture viewer, then your calibration may be the problem. It sounds like you only calibrated with PSP. You may need to calibrate in both PSP and PS7, as I don't think they share their monitor profiles.

When you say Matted photos I'm assuming you mean matte finish photos that have a textured surface? If so, check out the thread hear called Snake Skin and see if that helps.

Hope this helps...

--tks

[OhThatGirl2001]

Thanks for all the great suggestions. I suspect the the monitor profiles are different for PSP and Photoshop. I ran a few tests and re-calibrated both. I don't see a huge improvement - but am almost certain this is the issue - which I thank you for the suggestions!

The poor guys over at HP must think I'm nuts. The scanner I am using is HP Scanjet 5470 - 48 bit. HP has a auto levels correction that I ocassionaly use or manually adjust the midtones and highlights until it's a nice appearance. Unfortunately, the reason for my messaging HP was that once I scanned with the settings, the scan somehow appeared more faded. I scanned first and then saved it as a tiff. I would open it in Photoshop and it was a little less faded, but still - it was more faded then the original. In Paintshop Pro - it was more noticable. Sure, I adjusted the levels after looking at the histogram and curves appropriately, but I could not understand why it looked so bright before I scanned -
It looked crisp and the midtones were adjusted perfectly in HP Precision Pro program - but alas the scanned image never seemed to turn out as bright or crisp. It still distresses me

I appreciate the links to my other questions about the moire like pattern seen on the photos that were printed on a matted paper.
I've downloaded Eye Fidelity and will try it out.

Again, many thanks for the replies. I'm pretty new at this, but feel I'm in capable hand

Lisa
P.S. I sure hope this works - I've not tried posting a reply yet.

[Doug Nelson]

I'm not familiar with the calibration available within PSP, but I'm sure it's up to the task. One thing you might want to take into consideration is that the Photoshop calibrator loads (Adobe Gamma) when you boot Windows and therefore affects everything you see, including any other calibration programs (so you might accidentally be calibrating twice).

[Jill]

Hi Lisa!
As DJ said, you may want to just take a digital picture of it....I have done this with quite a few pictures with great results. One was a picture with a canvas (bumpy) background...another was a 100 year old picture someone had glued into a piece of driftwood! My favorite is of my Great Granparents wedding pic in an old rounded glass frame...something I couldn't take out and wanted to share with family....ahhhhh gone off topic here, if all else fails with the scanning I just take a picture! HTH

[OhThatGirl2001]

Thanks Jill,

It's an interesting compromise. I will have to try.


Lisa
I'd love to see the photos you've done.

[Jill]

I sure would love to share them....I hope I attach this right or I will be back to edit in a few minutes! The first picture is 2"x2" glued on wood/middle pic is triple the size of original because of the digital photo/end pic is great grandparents and has a rounded glass and original frame with paper backing so could never have scanned this! Love the digital camera!

[Tim_S]

Lisa,

When you say that the midtones look better, and the picture in general looks more crisp, I wonder if part of your problem might be in the scanning software.

It has been years since I've used HP scanners, so I'm not familiar with HP Precision Pro (gee I seem to be saying a lot about things I know nothing about lately... ) but, does it use a particular colorspace (sRGB, Adobe RGB etc.)? If it does, is PS/PSP set up to use that same color space. I have seen problems like mid-tone shifts when sufficiently differently color spaces are used.

As far as sharpness, many scanners will show you a preview image that has been sharpened, even if the final scan is not. You may have to look a bit to find the control for it.

Good luck
--tks

[OhThatGirl2001]

I want to thank everyone for the helpful suggestions. The problem is now fixed! Yippeeee

I discovered with all your help that I had 3 seperate color management settings. Adobe RGB which was what my monitor was using. Paintshop Pro using sRGB color space and Adobe Photoshop using another sRGB with a different setting that I calibrated. Well, I've set printer, monitor, Adobe Photoshop and Paintshop Pro to the same color mangement. The difference was amazing.

My scanner does not use it's own color mangement so I did not have to change anything there.

The images that I've scanner appear crisper!!!!

Boy, this has been an interesting exercise for me!

Cheers,
Lisa

[DJ Dubovsky]

Lisa
That's great. Glad we could be a contributing factor but mostly glad things are working for you.
DJ