Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   I'm [too slowly] still digitizing loads & loads of old photos when I find the time. Most of the time I just make basic adjustments since there's just not enough time to try to make every photo perfect, even if I never did anything else -- almost every photo ever taken by anyone anywhere could use some improvement, because cameras themselves are imperfect. The hard part, from a mix of ethics & experience, is judging what edits to make, and to what degree. The ethics part isn't complicated -- it's OK to remove a blemish or two, and maybe remove some of the emphasis on a wrinkle caused by lighting, but unless you're retouching for a glamour magazine, you don't want to alter someone's real world appearance. The contributions from experience are more involved... what changes would make the photo appear *noticeably* better to the *intended* viewer.

   That last part's important. You usually don't want to spend time fixing something that's only visible when you're viewing the photo zoomed in at 300x or more. With a picture of my kids, the fact that the sky's blown out is hardly noticeable to my wife or the family members most likely to see it, because our eyes are focused on the boys & what they're doing, but I wouldn't frame an enlargement or post it anywhere unless I replaced that sky.

   Many improvements that can matter a great deal aren't obvious unless you've got some experience under your belt. When someone says they want a *natural* photo, warts & all, with absolutely nothing artificial or AI, they often have little idea, or maybe concern, of what they're talking about. And that's perfectly fine, as long as *you* decide for yourself -- just don't let one of those folks try to tell you what you should care about. If excessive, things like noise can make a photo look worse, but the main, 1st concern should be lighting, since it effects every photo ever taken. [Sharpness matters too, though when you're editing it's already too late to do much more than fake it.] The 1st thing you should do -- maybe the only thing you'll want to bother with -- is go to the levels adjustment, making anything black close to black, & the same with whites, then adjust the middle range. You're not changing any of the initial data really, just how it's presented, and it can make a huge difference.

   If or as you get into photo editing there's tons more you can learn about editing, like working with curves, increasing decreasing the individual rgb colors at different lightness levels, and adjusting the brightness in different portions of the image, again not altering the original but enhancing what's already there. At the same time, the more powerful the editing tools & methods you use, the more opportunities you have to more seriously screw up. And one of the easiest ways to screw up is by using an unfortunately popular tool, the stamp or clone tool / brush. One aspect of the way humans see things is we spot patterns, and the one thing the stamp / clone tool often does is create patterns, marking every click or drag with the tool. While it can sometimes take a little work to isolate an area, consider trying one of the object removal tools instead. They can sometimes work much better, especially with textures, uneven lighting, foliage, & grass.

   Posted 2 years ago #
2. 

   gergn
   Member

   I still have Picasa ...

   Posted 2 years ago #
3. 

   Whiterabbit-uk
   Games Guru

   I'm in a similar position to your self, with thousands of negatives that I am slowly digitizing. I inherited many of my grandfathers negatives. He was a keen photographer and cinematographer who worked with Sam Hannah creating archive footage of lost crafts (not the Sam Hannah of Hannah Barbara fame). He gave me my first SLR at the age of eight (a Zenith). Prior to that you can see me with plastic 120 camera's that took reasonable images. I have far too many negatives to be able to edit everything, so I'm slowly choosing the best images. and cleaning them up as best I can.

   I use Photoshop CS2 which is now free to download HERE. Prior to that I used to use a paid for Photoshop v7.

   My in-laws left a box of slides in their attic, which was attacked by bird mites which severely damaged many of the slides. One in particular, a slide of my mother in law with my wife, taken moments following her birth. I spent around 30 hours editing out all the mite damage and improved the colour as the slide was taken on a higher ASA rating, so the images were not as saturated as say an ASA 25 rated slide. Once I'd digitized the slide, I would zoom in and edit out literally a few pixels at a time using the clone and sometimes the smudge tools with excellent results.

   I also used to do touch- ups for colleagues at work, all free of charge.

   Posted 2 years ago #
4. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   What I do, in case any of it is of any help...

   I spend the least time on prints taken mostly of our kids that are still usable, starting by using an Epson DS-410 document scanner. It's one of their cheaper models that I picked up on sale, has a max dpi of only 600, but as far as I can tell the working parts & optics aren't much different, if they're different at all, from Epson's more expensive models. What it does lack is the software that comes with the photo version of their doc scanner, but the driver provided does work well enough once settings are adjusted from the defaults, which are designed for OCR with B&W documents. [I'm anxious to try it with the VueScan software I recently bought using an Xmas gift card, but I've still got ~300 photos I'd previously scanned to go through. Ouch!] Using a doc scanner is SO MUCH faster than using a flatbed, but it has a downside... even though I do my best to clean the prints 1st, dust &/or debris always finds its way onto maybe one out of 10 prints, and when that happens, it gets onto the scanner lens and leaves streaks across every scan from then on. So I scan 5-10 prints at a time, checking each one is Windows Photo Viewer, starting over when streaks appear, cleaning the lens with a soft paint brush. Even using that admittedly tedious approach, I'd say using the doc scanner is at least 10x faster than using a flatbed.

   I've used an app called Photolemur [that's now free if you can find it] on a few thousand to just make minor improvements, making sure they're viewable, saving the original scan to go back to if I later want to give any of them the full treatment. With the photos I'm working on currently I've used the noise removal in the GOTD DVDFab Photo Enhancer AI, which for me was a HUGE eye opener. I've since found that it can leave anomalies, small areas of distortion, that may even have been fixed by an update, but I'm reluctant to go through 300 photos a 2nd time to find out. Once my eyes were opened to what AI noise removal can do, I picked up one of the 2 alternatives available for a good price during a holiday sale, Topaz DeNoise AI; it also has a P/Shop plugin, making the workflow faster.

   I pay the $10/mo for the current Photoshop & Lightroom package. Opening the .tif file saved from the DVDFab app, I 1st do a crop, then a levels adjustment. Next is a color balance adjustment layer if/when needed. Then I'll create a combined layer [Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E -- I remember it as CASE], zoom in to 300x, and use the healing brush on any scratches etc. Saving a copy [as a fail-safe] I'll then use the Luminar Neo plugin [I preordered it for 1/2 price last fall], making a few quick adjustments that do make a noticeable difference [I Love the Relight option on some snapshots]. Then I save the result as a jpg, alongside the original .tif from the scan.

   * * *

   I've just started working with negatives again... I bought a Minolta negative scanner years ago, but found using it too tedious, because the all too visible grain on scans required so much work; I wrapped it in plastic & packed it away. I bought the scanner so long ago -- I had to buy a pci card for the then brand new USB 2 (!) -- I had forgotten how bad the grain issue was, and I bought VueScan so I could use it again. The new AI noise removal saved me from packing it back away -- using that software seems like a miracle. The relatively few scans I've done got the same treatment as our old prints.

   Before I revived the negative scanner I made a rig to use my camera. I found that I could buy all sorts of rails & related parts on eBay cheap, so it was fairly simple to mount a tripod ball head on a wooden base, & attach a mount holding 2 short rails to that. I have a camera mount designed for macro photography that slides along those 2 rails, and it has a manual gear driven slide that allows fairly precise back & forth adjustment. The harder part was cobbling together the assembly to hold the negatives. I found and modified a negative strip holder that was made for some scanner, modified a small lightbox that was designed to attach to a camera lens to take photos of slides, cut up a black velvet gift bag to use as a bellows to keep out stray light, and mounted it all to a wooden base with a lamp head using a daylight flood light bulb behind it.

   In some ways it's quicker than the negative scanner, while relying on optics I don't have the same grain problems, but processing takes work; I use an old giveaway, ON1 Effects, to turn the negative image into a positive .dng RAW file that I then open in Lightroom. I like doing that better than making the negative -> positive change in Lightroom, since I feel that limits what I can do with the photo from then on in Lightroom. OTOH, while I can move a small tray off a small table next to my desk, and use the negative or doc scanner there, setting up and using the camera rig is a project taking up an entire afternoon or evening -- I just don't have the space to dedicate to that sort of thing.

   * * *

   The old, inherited photos, some from the 1930s, get the most work. I sandwich prints between non-reflective plexiglass [meant for picture frames] and white cardboard. I put that in a folding photo booth affair designed for photographing items you intend to sell online [there are all sorts these available on Amazon]. For lighting outside the translucent box affair I use small LED lights for photography / videography mounted on small tripods. I then use my camera mounted to a tripod that has a 90 degree arm -- something like this:

   https://www.amazon.com/360°Horizontal-Rotation-Professional-Projector-360°Panorama/dp/B07C1PXQVS/ref=sr_1_11?crid=254KCF1DV062V&keywords=photo+tripod&qid=1645207696&sprefix=photo+tripod%2Caps%2C78&sr=8-11

   I'll try to clean each print, then mount it to a sheet of paper beforehand -- one sheet usually holds several -- so swapping photos in that sandwich affair is quick & easy. I then move the photo sandwich to bring individual photos into the frame, taking photos of each using a remote trigger, so I don't cause any wiggle. That way I can photograph several dozen in a 2-3 hour session -- most of the time involved is in setup & breaking that setup down afterward.

   Doing it that way is faster, & I *think* higher quality than using a scanner [and my Canon goes to 48 optical], plus I get to work with RAW files; since they're all the data from the camera sensor, more adjustments are possible. Then it's on to Lightroom, where I make most adjustments, sending the photos to P/Shop for the final work. Since most adjustments are already done, the majority of the work there involves repairs. The most tedious part is what looks like a ton of dust, but is really I think where the photo has been worn away -- they've been in shoeboxes & such, moved around for almost 100 years. I'll add a duplicate layer, applying the dust & scratch filter to get rid of 90%+ of the problem, then use a mask to hide that layer. Then, painting on the mask in white, using a tablet, I'll dab the individual dust spots to make them disappear. Applying the dust & scratch filter at the levels needed greatly reduces the image's sharpness, so this way I mostly avoid that. After that P/Shop's healing brush usually takes care of any remaining blemishes. One option that I think is really cool with some of these old B&W photos is the relatively new [greatly improved in 2022] neural colorization filter. [I sent my sister some prints I had made of colorized photos of our parents, & she was thrilled.]

   Posted 2 years ago #
5. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   I still have Picasa ...

   And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. We all have stuff we like, and stuff we just have less or no interest in. If I sounded even a little harsh in my original post or comment I apologize -- it just bothers me a little bit when someone(s) says or implies that other people should be the same as them.

   It bothered me that someone commented on the recent Franzis GOTD that basically they don't like the purpose of the app that was being offered. The perhaps impolite thought that occurred to me was: "So what? I never asked, and really do not care if you like this sort of app or not. SO why are you saying that? Do you think everyone else should be the same?"

   Myself, I feel like I've been into photography, & later editing, forever. Like WR I started young -- I got my 1st camera when I was 8 years old. I got my 1st serious camera in High School -- a used Miranda Sensorex 35mm -- after using my father's old Kodak Pony [ancient even in the 60's] for a photojournalism course. RE: Editing, I got my 1st real scanner, a huge SCSI affair requiring an SCSI card & using a cable as thick as your index finger, in the late 80s, and used the software that I believe eventually became Windows Paint. Before that scanners were handheld affairs connected to the parallel port that you dragged / rolled across whatever you were scanning. It usually took multiple tries, because if you didn't drag it at an absolutely constant, steady speed, the height of portions of the scan were either stretched or compressed, kinda like a funhouse mirror. The photography part started tapering off by necessity when I became ill.

   The younger of our two sons is a tiny bit of an enthusiast -- while he likes and enjoys both photography & editing, they're at the bottom of the list of the stuff he likes, so he rarely spends time with either. His older brother sometimes likes taking photos with his phone, but once he takes them he's done, while my wife has zero interest whatsoever. I don't believe she's ever used her phone's camera.

   So if Picasa works for you, Great! If you wanted to try a more traditional but current photo editing app that also does some organizing, I'd suggest PaintShop Pro when it's included in one of the Humble Bundles. If the traditional part doesn't matter -- some people just prefer familiar GUIs -- you might check out Chasys Draw. Otherwise, as long as Picasa continues to do what you want/need, by all means keep using it.

   neowin[.]net/news/chasys-draw-ies-51201/

   Posted 2 years ago #

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