hi all. please may i have some advice

[exorcist]

recently i acquired photoshop 7
what i would like to do is restore some of my family's old, cracked, faded and torn photo's
what i would like to know please is:

suggested scanning settings, ie max, min, dpi, colour or greyscale for black and white and sepia photos.

as my printer is not up to photo quality print out standard, i would like to save the restored photo's to a floppy disk so that the photo's can be reproduced by a photo developing business

i would like to know:
what is the best mode?
and also
what is the best quality settings to use when resizing the images so that they can be transferred to a floppy disk

are there standard sizes of photos and if so, what are they

i thankyou all for your time and wish you all a very merry xmas
Exo

[d_kendal]

Hi Exo,

welcome to RetouchPro!!!
For scanning, it depends on what size you plan on printing your photos. If you're just going to be printing 4x6 to 8 x10 in size, then a min of 300dpi and max of 600 dpi will probably work best for you, since then you'll have lots of resolution for doing small detail restoration work. If you plan on printing anything poster size, then you can try scanning at 1200 dpi, but that depends on how much ram you have, if you have 512+ MBs you'll be fine, but if you have less it will be very slow and hard to work with because it'll be constantly using the scratch disk.
It's almost always best to scan in color, since one of the RGB channels can sometimes have more details or less damage than the others.
For quality settings, when you are going to a printer to get your work printed, its best to use either BMP or TIFF, uncompressed, except if floppy is your only option for storage, that could be a problem because of the file size. is there any way you could burn the file(s) on CD? if not, Jpeg is another option, but be carefull not to put the quality too low or you'll get jpeg artifacts on the prints. here's a good link to a calculator for deciding what resolution to use. hope that helps you out!

- David

[jeaniesa]

Hi Exo,

Welcome to RetouchPRO! Sounds like you've got quite a project ahead of you.

David gave you some excellent advice. One thing that I'll add is that if you are planning on enlarging any of your photos, I wouldn't go past 2x in size. In my experience, there just isn't enough information in the print that the scanner can pick up past 2x in size. (Put another way, if you are shooting for a 300dpi final print size, you can scan at 600dpi to allow you to adjust the size to 2x.)

A GREAT site for scanning tips is www.scantips.com. I just looked and there is even a section on restoring genealogical photos there now. Wayne has an extensive explanation on pixel dimension & dpi that may help you. If you are very new to scanning, you might want to purchase his book.

Always scan photos in color. Like David said, even B&W or sepia prints most often have different information in each of the channels which you will find helpful when you start to restore the photos.

Storing to floppy may be a problem if you're hoping to print larger photos (i.e. 8x10). A floppy can only hold 1.44MB and the only way you can get down to that size is JPEG. Unfortunately, you may lose some quality that you're not happy about in the compression process. Whatever you do, be sure to save the final version as a TIFF (or BMP) so that you have a version which hasn't been compromised by the JPEG compression. I think you'll find very quickly that a CD burner is essential for storing photos off of your hard disk. I can't imagine life without one. You may be able to get by with a ZIP disk for taking photos to a lab for printing, but for long term storage, it's hard to beat the price per megabyte that you get with CD storage. (Of course, I've now got my sights set on a DVD burner b/c the storage size is so large, but need to wait for the price to come down a bit.)

Standard sizes of photos seems to differ slightly between metric and non-metric countries. So, for example, a 4x6" print in the US equates to a 10x15cm print. Other "standard" print sizes are 4x5", 5x7", 8x10", 11x14", 16x20" & 20x30". You may also find some labs print 8x12", 16x24" or 24x30". Some of the desktop Epson printers print up to 13x19". The wide-format printers can print up to 44" (with just about any length.)

I recommend that you talk to the lab you want to use and find out what they offer in terms of sizes - and what they require for file formats (TIF, JPG, etc. and what resolution) to print.

Hope this helps,
Jeanie

[exorcist]

thankyou all very much

thankyou for the warm welcome
this advice is fantastic and i thankyou
hope to become an active member of this great forum
keep up the good work guys
exo

[phili1]

OK I own both a film and a flat bed scanner.

Even thought flat beds can go to a very high resolution level, when you scan a print your in essencence scanning in 2 dimentional so the colorations and d max are limited. It is my findings like David said that scanning on a flat bed should be done at between 400 and 600 resoloution. If you scan a 4 x 6 you can reproduce a fantastic 5 x 7 and if the photo has a high resolution you can get a real good 8 x 10. Some of the older prints were 5 x 7 and 8 x10 so you could get a larger print. Some of the new falt beds do a better job now so if you have one that can change things.

Saving for printing. A floppy disc is only 1.4 meg of space, so you would have to compress it so that all you can expect is maby if you are lucky a 3 x 5 just ok print. The best way to do your process is when you scan the print save it as a tiff. The reason is that a tiff does not loose any detail or pixels when you do adjustment in Photoshop. A CD Burner is only about $150.00 for a TDK or similar and a CD will give you 700 meg of space to download to at a cost of about 50 cents. Best CD to buy is Verbatim there coating last longer then the Staple or Office Depot brands.

Last when you scan you will see that you will have about a 10 to 20 Meg file in tiff format so you can see It wont fit a floppy.

I just finished a job, a 6 x 7 wedding picture with lots of cracks and I printed it as an 8 x 10 and the sharpness is awsome so 11 x 17 is very possable.
Now if you want to send it over the web Photoshop & has a save as web setting and you make a JPG file.

Have fun