[scribus] Scanning photos for a book project

[Rolf-Werner Eilert]

Am 27.01.2015 18:48, schrieb William Bader:
>> Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 16:53:13 +0100
>> From: eilert-sprachen at t-online.de
>> To: scribus at lists.scribus.net
>> Subject: [scribus] Scanning photos for a book project
>>
>> I am about to make a family chronicle with a lot of old photos. The
>> older ones are of course baryte paper prints which have a nice rough
>> surface.
>>
>> Scanning the first photos, I find that there is too much light on the
>> shadows, and the surface structure results in tiny white stripes and
>> spots, reflections which show the paper structure but may be disturbing
>> when the photos are viewed in the book.
>>
>> With the Gimp I can easily compress the shadows a bit so that black
>> becomes black, but the tiny spots remain.
> ...
>> So there are actually 2 problems: There is no automatic for finding the
>> right black value point, and there is the problem that the lamp lights
>> the paper structure too much. I tried to turn the photos by 90°, but to
>> no avail.
>
> You could try post-processing with other more-specialized applications like LightZone http://www.lightzoneproject.org/ instead of gimp.
> Scanning at a lower resolution might make the paper structure less apparent, especially if you are currently scanning at over 300 dpi.
> William
>   		 	   		

Thanks for the tip, I'll try that. However, scanning at lower 
resolutions would sometimes mean I cannot enlarge details so much, so I 
would still prefer scanning at 600 dpi in some cases. Photo prints at 
that time were pretty small, merely contact prints of the negatives.

We do not have most of the negatives anymore, but a contact print gives 
almost the complete range of details of the negative. On some photos the 
persons are too far away, and they can hardly be identified on the 
print. But when scanned with a higher resolution, you will find a lot of 
details, and suddenly you can clearly see their faces.

Lightzone seems to be pretty much like Darktable, which I use. Good idea 
to try such a tool. You mean, adjusting the black and white levels AFTER 
scanning with standard settings is ok?

Rolf