New member with general question

[marggg]

Hi, this is my first post. I am looking for advice about old photo preparation. Currently my sister emails me JPGs of old bw family photos. She scans them in color at 150-300 dpi. I work on them in ps and email back the new JPG.

After searching and reading other posts, I can see this isn't the optimal process. What would be better? Are JPG's ok? I know TIFF's have more info, but they might be too big for email attachments. Is 150-300 dpi adequate? I appreciate any advice, links or whatever you might have.

I've attached before and after photos of my latest project.
Thanks...

[0lBaldy]

Originally Posted by marggg

Hi, this is my first post. I am looking for advice about old photo preparation. Currently my sister emails me JPGs of old bw family photos. She scans them in color at 150-300 dpi. I work on them in ps and email back the new JPG.

After searching and reading other posts, I can see this isn't the optimal process. What would be better? Are JPG's ok? I know TIFF's have more info, but they might be too big for email attachments. Is 150-300 dpi adequate? I appreciate any advice, links or whatever you might have.

I've attached before and after photos of my latest project.
Thanks...

Welcome to RetouchPRO! Hope you enjoy your stay here and make lots of friends.

I will let others answer the TIFF question because I have no printing, quality, or saving issues at this time , as I am not in the profession any more and have no need to save layers or my work flow, so now I just use Jpeg.

For larger files I want to share with others I use MediaFire (supports a maximum file size of 200MB for free accounts and 2GB for MediaPro subscribers.)

This thread : Scanners, textures, scratches, cracks, silvering May help with the scanner question.

It looks like you do some fine retouching/restoration work... looking forward to seeing more from you! Nice Job!

[MiningArt]

Nice job on your touch up. Think of the JPG format as write once read many, where every load and write further degrades the image. When your sister saved as jpg it was degraded and when you saved as jpg it was degraded again. Most all ISP service providers give user server space as part of the account. Just use the space for transferring your images to each other, or any image server that you both have access to. Any loss-less image format will do, png, tif, pcx, bmp, whatever you prefer using. Scan at the highest hardware resolution in color, many suggest also to do a straight scan with no scanner adjustments. When you use compression with, say png, the difference between the lowest setting and the highest compression setting is how hard the routine works to crunch the image. At a setting of 1 a little, at settings like 9 it does multi-passes and uses techniques to squeeze every byte. The resulting image is still loss-loss at both settings.

[TerryB]

Another option which gives you the best of both worlds:
1. Have your sister scan at 300 ppi and save as lowest compression (highest quality) jpg.
2. You open the jpg in PS and immediately save as psd copy.
3. Do all of your work on that psd file, and when finished save as lowest compression (highest quality) jpg.
There will be minor, but unnoticeable loss in quality.

[TommyO]

Margg,
You also asked for links.
One I particularly like for concise information of relevant topics is from Cambridge University. Just look at the "Imaging" section on this page, as there is a bit about image file types.

Cambridge Digital Photography Tutorials

[seattle-light]

Dear Marggg...

You could always get a dedicated online storage place and transport TIFF or PSD files. But it would take more time to upload and download the larger files, and then there wouldn't be an apparent gain in quality.

JPEG compression at high quality settings is actually pretty good. And it's used all the time for moving around professional artwork.

Most stock photography is sent out electronically in JPEG format and then later on it's sent out to publication electronically in JPEG format in that it is compressed using Acrobat which uses JPEG compression to create a PDF file.

That means there is at least one and usually two generations of loss in almost every image that appears in a magazine or advertisement without noticeable degradation.

As long as you're not working on the file as a JPEG and you're working with high quality settings for transport you should be fine.

Images travel as high quality JPEGs, but you need to work on them as PSD files and then save a copy as a JPEG when you're done working on it -- your working file is never a JPEG. The danger with the lossy JPEG compression is that compression artifacts/blockiness build up exponentially over time as the format discards a lot of "unnecessary" information every time it is saved as a JPEG. As a practical mater, there are only so many times you can throw out 90% of the data in a file before you throw out something important -- seems obvious, but that's what it's doing in order to save space -- it's a miracle that it works as well as it does.

And make sure that you have a clear naming convention that allows you to distinguish your incoming/before JPEGs from you're outgoing/after JPEGs so you're not overwriting your original source file or accidentally sending out the incoming/before file.

Hope you are doing well. Take care. Alan.

[marggg]

Thank you all for your replies. They were very helpful and I learned a few new things.

This is my latest project. The orig was a "post card", common I guess back in those days. The man is my great great grandfather, Vito Cavaliere, born in 1842. He must have been in his twenties. According to family mythology (?) he was a member of the Italian royal protectorate and got that metal for saving the king. Who knows?

The post card was "touched up" so the orig I worked from had very little detail, as you can see. I had to guess alot and I hope that's not too apparent !!


... if there is a more appropriate place to post my work, pls let me know.

[aartist]

Marggg, I like your work.
You have a close eye for detail.

I agree with the others on scanning, working and saving photos.
Good Luck!

[jesterjeni]

your original as you posted should have looked something like this one I posted
I was able to draw out its natural colors. I like yours better!