Photo Rescue

We were going through boxes of old photo albums and happened upon a collection containing photos over 100 years old.   The pages of the albums fell apart to the touch.   Examining the back of the photos showed that they had originally been mounted on black paper that must have fallen apart before they were remounted on off white paper.


Rescue:


PART I - PAGE SCAN RESCUE   Patty went about and did the first stage of album rescue and personally spent half a day scanning the pages for reference & backup.


PART II - DSLR RESCUE   We then went about photographing entire pages and individual photos using a DSLR camera setup.  The setup could have been better with professionally lit flat tables and camera mounts - We did this under the kitchen counter lights, often holding the image by hand to adjust lighting angles to glare elimination.   This would introduce parallax errors but the way we did it.

PART III - FLATBED SCANNER RESCUE   The first attempts used multi-function copier, scanner fax machine which did a surprisingly good job with its 1028 dpi resolution but took an immense amount of time, especially for the lamp to warm up.   Researching photo scanning on the web we purchased an Epson V-600 for the job - A flatbed scanner with LED lighting (no lamp warm up needed) and capable of scanning photos, slides, and negatives.   The last scanner I had is an ancient Canon 8400F which only let you process one scan at a time and made me quit earlier scanning attempts.   Modern software lets you load several photos at once and it will scan each photo individually and assign it a unique filename.   Finally, today's state of the are allows for 4028 dpi for photos which produced massive size TIFFs which would bog to my 8gb iMac as it prepares previews for LightRoom.  The 3200 dpi resolution provides good results.   Time for a new computer...   Scanning at this points ranges from 8 to 21 minutes and image.

Assuming the original photo was "good", the corrections needed are crop & white balance.   Other corrections include contrast, clarity, shadows, gradient filters and sharpening, etc.


RESTORATION SOFTWARE - From my shutter bugging work,  I use Adobe Lightroom 5.7 while there may be other better tools for photo restoration. Each foto was oriented/cropped true with excess borders as the excess material often contained notes and means to puzzle together the original layout.

Touch up included a) white balance, b) exposure, c) highlight trim, d) contrast/saturation trim, and lastly, e) noise and sharpness trim.   Frequent eye breaks were needed.   Try not to do this when you're fatigued - You don't want to have to rework.    Work in small batches so that the work does not become overbearing

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