scanning old photos

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I've had very bad luck at scanning old photos. Most of them are on textured on matte paper and the scanner picks up the surface. In a copy stand I always used polarizers on the lights and lens - cross polarized from each other. Is there a scanner made where it's possible to stick polarizers inside for this purpose? Better yet, is there one made that already has them? Jon Kaplan

-- Jon Kaplan (jon@the-kaplans.com), May 20, 2001

Answers

I use an old UMAX Astra 1200 scanner to scan photos and I scan them in to Adobe Photoshop. The resolution I scan at depends on however large a size or how hige a resolution I want the final outcome to be - but the minimum I scan at is 600 dpi (black and white). After you scan it in - you use the Gaussian blur filter to "smooth" out the texture of the matte surface. It will blur it somewhat - but then you use "unsharp mask" to bring back the sharpness you have lost. Then when you sharpen it as much as you can you use "sharpen edges" once or twice and you end up with a satisfactory result. You can use this with tintypes or daguerreotype, too and the results are outstanding.

As far as anything mechanical is concerned, I can't help you.I only scan and restore digitally.

P. Lenz

-- P. L. Lenz (grlen@mediaone.net), June 27, 2001.


Some newer scanners (including one of the Nikon models) utilize a technology whereby dust and scratches are removed automatically during the scan. Having no first hand experience with such a scanner, I'm not able to tell you if they'd remove surface texture or not, but perhaps you could try one at a dealer to see if it would serve your needs.

-- John LaPlant (pix@planet-mail.com), July 10, 2001.

I know exactly what you meen. I don't understand why no one has added polorization to scanners. It would beifit almost every reflection scan. I do use a method that helps, but it takes some extra time. Scan the image normaly and then rotate it 180 in the scanner and scan it again. Now that you have the two scans in photoshop rotate the inverted one to match the first and copy it as a layer. set the layer property to differance and use free transform to align the images (It should go nearly black). Once the images are aligned change the layer property to darken. You can then flatten the image for retouching.

-- Mark LaPlante (mark@photosmithinc.com), July 15, 2001.

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