[scribus] Scanning photos for a book project

[Sveinn í Felli]

Þann mið 28.jan 2015 07:47, skrifaði 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.

Paper texture can be a pain to eliminate, people have written all kinds 
of filters (similar to moire-filters in Gimp), maybe you can go that route.
But I just wanted to mention a couple of different approaches (a bit 
analog ones):

30+ years ago I recall using transparent sheets between photos and 
scanner glass to get rid of patterns (80's color paper prints - awful). 
Those transparencies were developed for photocopying purposes (several 
rastering grids, but also for texture "softening"). Haven't seen those 
in ages, and probably they're not adequate for high precision scanning.

Instead of using a flatbed scanner to scan old prints, a friend of mine 
mounted a DSLR camera on a darkroom enlarger, using various lights from 
various angles, a nice flat-projection 50mm lens and had several 
different types of glass plates to weight down the prints; stunning results.
Actually he used a similar setup for a bunch of old slides too...

Just some thoughts,

Sveinn í Felli

>>> 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