Photo Editing & Restoration

Note: The manipulated & restored images in the video presentation are the actual ordered request from my clients.

Get Better Scans of Your Photographs

Scanners are cheaper than ever, and can be a great tool for storing and making copies of valuable family documents such as photos and official records. Learn how to get the best image while keeping your file size low.

Scanners are being added to home computers at a very rapid rate as their price goes down and their performance improves. Most genealogists are involved in sharing and caring for the past and have many uses for a scanner. Here are a few tips and tricks.

Think about file size

Most scanners for the home market have a resolution of 600 ppi. (not really necessary in my opinion). The eye can’t see passed 240 ppi. I personally scan any size print that will fit on to the glass area of my scanner to a tif file @ 300 ppi, sized to

an 8”x10”, this produces a 20.6 megabyte image, but if I save it afterwords as a full res jpg. the file can be re-sized down to an approximate file of 4.4 megabytes without any visual damage to the file that the human eye can see. Scanning a small portion of a photo for later enlargement is one of the few occasions that you will need the highest resolution. Over time this sizing will make sense as you examine what your scanner is producing.

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Compressing images

Few people seemed to be aware of image compression, yet this is simple. All images can be saved as JPEGs, which take up a fraction of the original file size. When you open up a JPEG image, it is automatically decompressed and displayed as normal. Some programs give you no choice as to how far the image can be compressed while others allow you to make fine gradations.

You can't scan an image as a JPEG — the image will almost always be a TIFF file. However, instead of just naming the image before you save, go to Save As, scroll down to JPEG and then Save.

At this stage you may be offered a degree of compression, usually on a scale of 1- (1 is most compressed, 10 the least). Experiment to find the right degree for you. At the low (1-2) end, images lose a bit in quality. Until you are familiar with this feature, you may wish to try an 8. I personally leave it 10 or 12 as the highest your program may offer.

JPEG files are considerably smaller than TIFF files — savings of 95 percent are common. Please note: JPEG compression should not be used on any file that is to be opened, modified and re-saved; something that you are likely to do when restoring damaged or faded photographs. This is because while the quality loss using JPEG is minimal, the problems compound themselves at each saving of the file.

Learn to adjust contrast, brightness and sharpness

The idea of doing their own photo restoration scares many people. Certainly retouching damaged photos requires a considerable degree of skill but if the image is basically sound, you can improve it considerably by adjusting the brightness, contrast and sharpness — not unlike setting a good TV picture. Most of the photo enhancement programs feature an automatic facility (not always prominent in the manual). Try this — it will often (not always) improve your image, sometimes magically. If your changes do not show any improvement or look worse, simply Undo those changes and try again.

Save Black and White as Black and White. Any questions?

Your data files can keep color information even if you see your images as a black and white after you scan it. This is just extra space on you desk. Scan your black & white images as black and white to save space. If you like the color tone that your black & white has obtained over the years then keep the color information for that look.

What you see is not always what you get.

Ocassionally I send proofs to my clients, as they look at them on an older or not color balance monitor, they may view them darker, lighter or discolored than how I view them on my monitor. My monitor is balanced to meet my labs requirement on final print output. Please be aware that no 2 monitor are the same when viewing others image that where sent to you. note: monitors are way closer to matching than they use to be.

Photographic images on a computer monitor can often look fabulous — but we are actually viewing them at low resolution, usually at 72 dpi (the resolution also used on the web).

Images in most magazines are reproduced usually @ 133 dpi and many color printers are 720 dpi plus. You need different resolutions for different purposes.

Don't keep your only images on your hard drive!

Although computer hard disk space is now a fraction of the cost that it was a few years ago, it is a lousy place to keep your precious images. Just ask anyone who has been around computers for over a decade: you'll be lucky to find someone who has not lost a hard drive at some time (I have lost 3 hard drives totaling between 400 to 600 images of finished portraits in a 13 year period). I do have all my original raw images on optical discs. The data on hard drives can be recovered by specialists but the costs are horrendous.

If you have a reasonable number of black and white images and you take our recommendations to JPEG them, you can burn them to CD or DVD discs. They are cheap and almost all computers can read and write to these.

External hard drives are cheap now, download and store off the computer.

Making Prints

It's all very well to scan and share your pictures electronically but we want traditional prints for scrapbooking and to give to others.

Technology is so amazing now. Printer inks and papers are now near perfection. They are capable of producing high quality, long lasting, photographic looking images.

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We try to grab pieces of our lives as they speed past us. Photographs freeze those pieces and help us remember how we were. We don't know these lost people but if you look around, you'll find someone just like them.
Gene McSweeney