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scanning yearbook photos

Forums: Questions and Answers About Building Your Site
Created on: 05/11/11 02:56 AM Views: 4691 Replies: 10
Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 2:56 AM

This will work with any scanner that'll do 1200 or 2400dpi and any flavor of Photoshop. And means a specific scanner type won't be needed.

1) Scan the photo at 2400 dpi, tiff format. (remember to set to b/w if the photo is this). 1200dpi is passable but anything less and the final product will be a bit fuzzy.

2) Open the scan in Photoshop. Apply a median filter under the filter/noise/median tab. Since most printed publications use about a 133 line halftone screen, setting the median filter to 11 pixels will make the dot pattern go away.

3) Add a bit of detail by applying an unsharp mask. This is found under the tab filter/sharpen/unsharp mask. I use 100%, 4 pixel radius, 0 threshold but experimenting here is fine.

4) Reduce the image size by going to Image/image size, changing width to percent, and using about 5.16% (for 2400dpi scan). This makes the photo about the same size it was when it was taken.

5) Correct for contrast and brightness as needed under the image adjust tab.

6) Crop as needed and resize to 125 pixels wide, under image/image size.

7) Save it as the a jpg in the file name you wish for the class mate.

Cool Upload it under classmates profiles yearbook photo.

Hope this'll help...

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Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 1:17 PM - Response #1

A few notes:

The quality of the yearbook photos (and the paper it's printed on) mainly control one's results. Sometimes tinkering can improve contrast and brightness. Paper that is textured is awful to work with. The higher the scan res, the worse the resultWink That's because it starts picking up the actual paper dimples. Wish I had a 100 ton press.

Various scanners have different quirks. So one has to play around with various options to see what works.

Many scanners do not have TIFF (notably home use HP does not - probably the #1 scanner sold). What one does is set the JPG setting to highest quality instead.

Besides Photoshop, free ones such as GIMP and Irfanview work similarly. Paintshop Pro is one of the easiest of all to use and not expensive.

Playing around with the DPI (sometimes listed as PPI) is suggested. Usually 200 -600 DPI works fine since it evens out imperfections in the scan in the hardware.

Experiment with both b/w and color to see if it helps the final product. I find that color scans gives me a bit more control over the final product. In the end JPG is the same regardless of color or not.

These are generic ideas, not just for yearbook photosRazz

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Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 2:09 PM - Response #2

This is why I seldom post on help forum sites....

1) The HP Scanjet 3970 is a "home scanner" and does tiff. It's what I used. And there are third party programs like VueScan which believe will let you save as tiff and it supports almost any twain based scanner. (its' about $40) With this any old fax/copier/scanner will make tiff files...

2)Generally yearbooks are printed on about 80 lb gloss or semi gloss white bond paper and the textured paper isn't an issue. Clearly textured yearbook pages for class photos aren't typical.

3)Yes, there are all sorts of other programs out there that can do this too. I happen to use Photoshop.

4)Yes, you can scan in color, convert to lab color, process the a and b channels separately, then convert to jpg... You can not only play with brightness and contrast but you can alter gamma curves too. You can do all sorts of things.

My goal here was to try to keep it simple yet get good results. I found the FAQ on scanning yearbook photos helpful but not everyone is using or can lay their hands on a Canon Cano-Scan scanner. I wanted to give an alternative using another possible path. It wasn't to cover every possible situation, scanner, software, paper combo or to go into a mini seminar on photo processing in photoshop...

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Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 4:08 PM - Response #3

Aside: my Canon scanner's software supports TIFF but I rarely use it because TIFF files tend to be significantly larger than JPG files.

I have Photoshop Elements, and other commercial ($) software for image manipulation, etc, but prefer to use Google's Picasa (FREE & available for both PC & MAC, see http://picasa.google.com). Picasa talks to your scanner software (via Import function) and I find it works well to fix, edit, sort, catalog & organize photo albums. I've found it has all the cropping, straightening, image correction, and other features I've ever needed for our purposes.

In addition to using Picasa for management of photos, scanned or not, which I then uploaded to CC, we also host our yearbooks (we're a 3-year group, but also have yearbooks online for a couple of years before and after our grad years) on http://picasaweb.google.com. Yes, I do intend to bring them all onto CC's Photo Gallery eventually, but I prefer picasaweb's upload and management features.

Picasa for the PC/MAC also works well with email and Facebook too so it's my general purpose image/photo tool here. Occasionally I'll need something more robust, but rarely.

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Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 4:30 PM - Response #4

When using Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, size> save files at 72 PPI> and save for web. This will optimize file for the web and use very little space on your site. I don't know about other applications.
My web site is large and has many images. I have used just over half of my allotted space on our site.
Classmate Jimmy Z

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Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 9:00 PM - Response #5

I guess I should have mentioned that many (most?) people use the current HP combo scanner/printer units vs a dedicated scanner - that's what I meant about the #1 scanner. For example, the HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus (legal scan) only does JPG - there is no other option with the standard software.

However, that's not really an issue for the purposes of scanning for web pages. Scanning with JPG set at best quality is pretty good - indistinguishable from any raw format like TIFF for our purposes. The demands for web publishing are pretty low compared to printing.

JPG has inherent properties that make color vs b/w not much of an issue. The main thing to recognize for JPG is that make sure you save a copy of the original scan before tinkering. If you save a JPG, then reload and save again, you get successive distortion. IOW - always work from the original and save to a different name. Plus for CC use, save with about medium compression since that looks the same on a computer and makes images 1/2 the download size.

DPI (PPI) also relates to what size images one wants to display. Again, this is a personal choice and nothing more. You'll rarely need to go past 200. I bypass ALL of CC image sizing by not using the IMAGE folder (too restrictive), but instead my own named folders and have direct links to same and custom code. Gallery images ATM are limited to 1024 or so wide, maybe new CC 3 will allow larger?

I scan at around 200 DPI but limit image dimensions to usually 1600 wide and the image size to no more than 150KB. The end result is the ability to see optional detail in images via zoom. (Home page has a sample of what I mean about zooming - internal pages have much larger images.)

ALL of my yearbooks are awful quality. The 1959 one used textured paper and is horrible for scanning. The 1960 and 1961 have terrible image quality - worse then the cheapest digital cameraConfused.

Don't know how common this is, but that's why I mentioned it - so some others in my era do not get disappointed in their scans - the source might be the issue, not your skillWink

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Edited 05/11/11 10:32 PM
Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 9:11 PM - Response #6

John Ludovico wrote:

I did all of our classmates photos with my Olympus Digital Camera.

Exactly. Olympus takes great pictures with good lighting. My 1st and 2nd cameras were Olympus. Probably others do well too by now.

Along those lines you described, instead of faxing stuff, I take a picture of sketches and documents with my camera and send via email. Much better than fax quality.

Taking pictures of the yearbook pages is something that I'm going to do next to see if that helps. Main problem is me holding camera steady enoughRolling Eyes Thanks for reminding me.

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Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 11:02 PM - Response #7

From this post, I became curious if I could get the HP to scan and save in a different format with standard installed software.

Turns out that the installed Windows FAX software can scan and Save as TIFF, BMP, GIF, PNG or JPG. All except JPG are lossless formats (image is stored dot for dot just as scanned).

So that was worthwhile discoveringIdea

(GIF is useful for some images where you don't want any distortion - and color range is not subtle.)

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 5:02 AM - Response #8

One other comment to make here. Yes, Tiff files are bigger, it's cause they're lossless. That means it's saved effectively pixel for pixel. It's what most serious professional photographers use (or raw format specific to camera types). Jpg files are smaller cause they compress the image. This can also cause artifacts depending on how much compression is cranked when they're saved. That's why they're smaller, and also why they aren't exact replications of what's been shot or scanned. And since most pros like to manipulate images post shooting, they save in the bigger but less loss, formats. You never get something for nothing.

If not handled properly those jpg artifacts can be just as bad if not worse than the textured paper issue brought up earlier.

Since the whole idea was to get as much information as possible, then filter out dots with a median filter, I intentionally chose Tiff as the format to save before processing.

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 11:11 AM - Response #9

For professionals printing paper images, true. For CC or most web publishing, artifacts are only noticeable if one zooms in. The rule is that it looks ok on screen, then not to worry.

However, since in the end one saves in JPG, all that careful preserving gets the JPG artifacts. IOW, professionals never save in JPG for printing purposes. But we are not printingWink Professionals also have much better equipment. Meaning the raw data is much better quality. The old pig, sow's ear story. DPI (like number of pixels in a camera) is a misleading spec.

Try scanning in JPG with the least compression (aka highest quality) and compare to any of the lossless ones I listed. Most amateurs can not tell the difference on a computer screen (paletted GIF yes). Difference between middle and lowest (edit: highest quality) compression also takes a very sharp eye to see any difference.

It's really not something that becomes a problem. We are sort of missing my comment that JPG may be all that's easily available on CURRENT devices, but it's not really a big deal.

BTW, if one has large images (e.g. 8x11 scanned at 2400, it takes a very high end system to make quick changes. Or a very patient personShocked

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Edited 05/14/11 3:06 PM
Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 2:31 PM - Response #10

I'm in agreement with all of Jack's points...

And do tell, having to manipulate full page TIFF files (that I do occasionally scan) make my (very old now) PC feel like wading through a vat of molasses.

OK, just lemme jot that down as yet another reason for upgrading my machine to a new quad processor machine... the dual-processor HP laptop I bought on sale for my wife a few years ago, outperforms my old single AMD processor desktop by far Sad

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