They're family pictures...not material that's going to be printed poster size and/or published in National Geographic. In short, find a solution that's reasonably economical in time and cost and that you can 'live with'.
Perhaps 3-4 years ago, I scanned maybe 200 family photos for a friend whose last parent died and she wanted each of her siblings to have copies of the photos. This is when I learned the hard way that the physical location of the scanner relative to my computer is important. Due to space considerations, it was on a shelf above the monitor...bad choice. I did a lot of stand up, sit down, etc those two days (in addition to full-time employment) to scan them and clean them up with a very primitive version of Photoshop. So primitive, it came FREE with my Canon G3 camera. The biggest problem scanning old photos was trying to clean them up and do some limited color correction. I think I spent perhaps 2-3 minutes editing each photo. There were a few that had lots of spots in image 'flaking off' that I cloned to fix...those took a while longer.
Spin forward to 2 months ago. I decided to start scanning my 5,000 or more railroad slides I took in the 60s, 70s and 80s. After some research, I found the Epson V550 very highly recommended for slide scanning as it does 4 at a time. I was very fortunate that my slides were stored in living space in my home(s) through all the years. So there wasn't a lot of color shifts and other problems. Dust, tons of it! Using a lens brush and blower on the slides before scanning them helped, but wasn't the end-all. I scanned and edited maybe 100 slides a week...no big hurry.
I was approached by a friend perhaps a month ago about converting some family pictures she had. All slides. I said sure. I expected maybe 200-300 family pictures on slides in the last 40-50 years. I've never encountered anyone who did family pictures on slides from the '50s forward. That is, until she showed up with 20 boxed, Kodak Carousel trays (80s & 140s) full of slides. And a shirt box with slides in baggies, and little red and yellow boxes from Kodak, full of slides, as well.
So I started scanning. Although I knew that film (or negatives) don't 'age' particularly well, and expecting image quality comparable to my own slide collection, I was floored at what I found. Perhaps 5-10% of the slides had turned mostly dark...very dark. A good percentage of those were hopeless. Another 15-20% had lost all sharpness…like watching old TV clips from the 50s that one can barely make out whose face it is. A handful in each box had fungus or mold on them, in addition to the dust. Turns out her mother had gone through them perhaps 5 years earlier and got things terribly mixed up between boxes, and it was exceptional to find 3-4 slides in a row all oriented properly in the slide trays. Made scanning so much fun. My new scanner was more conveniently located, on a table to my left and about 3 feet behind me. So I simply roll back and forth while scanning.
But that was just SOME of the problems in the slides. Some had substantially faded (Sears and Ansco films, mostly). Others had a strong dark blue cast to them, in addition to being rather dark. In some, all but one color faded. In others, only the reds were decent levels, the rest had to be manually tweaked.
In the end, I treated it as a production-line operation, scanning one box at a time then doing all processing at that point. Like my own digital photography, I use Lightroom first and Photoshop Elements second. The reason is that some functions, like WB, lighting adjustments, single color correction, and horizontal leveling are easiest for me in LR. On occasion, using the image correction feature to get verticals more vertical works well. But I couldn't use that across the board as the framing of the photos was so bad as trying to level and vertical them would crop out subjects in the picture. PS Elements has a dynamite 'auto' function for smart fix, or lighting and color settings. So I try those to get ‘final’ color & exposure settings. And I find that cloning in PSE is considerably easier in LR. I also have the Noiseware product in PSE as well, and that comes in quite handy to fix the noise added by increasing exposure, sometimes dramatically (4-5 stops?), in the photos. The ‘despeckle’ and ‘dust and scratches’ functions in PSE are also quite useful. Although I found that ‘dust and scratches’ at anything bigger than 1 pixel lost too much clarity. But sometimes I had to get desperate.
I spent more than 2 weeks, averaging about 6-8 hours per day, scanning and cleaning up those slides. The dust and scratches was the biggest problem, and required considerable use of the ‘heal’ function in LR and cloning in PSE. I estimate that it took about 3 minutes per slide to do everything…unloading/loading the trays and post processing. It also helped me learn a couple of features in each of the programs and develop a couple of tricks, like de-dusting the sky and grassy areas using the PSE clone feature at 20-30% opaqueness.
That was the good news.
By the 2nd or 3rd box of slides, I discovered that my scanner was erratically overexposing some of the slides. I ran several tests and discovered that slide #1 was consistently overexposed, #2 sometimes over- and sometimes under-exposed, and #3 and #4 always OK. Unfortunately, I had exceeded the Amazon return limit, and as I saved $60 or so buying a refurb (expecting refurbed camera and lens quality testing), I sprung for a brand new one…another V550. I rescanned a lot of slides in the 3 days until the new scanner arrived. I was off to the races…again.
Not –
It only took me 3 days to prove the new scanner had exactly the same problem as the first one! So I got a refund from Amazon.
Although the Epson scanner software was mostly intuitive and easy to use, the BIG problem with it is it could not be FORCED in any size, shape or form to scan anything other than 35mm slides. Perhaps 50% of them were 35mm. The rest were some 110 slides and a lot of 120 (?) slides that had an image area of 27mm x 27mm. Unconditionally, it would shave a couple mm of one side…a different side for each of the 4 slides in the scan! No matter what, the resultant image was rectangular, with a black bar on one or two edges. Hopefully, nobody will notice that part of the house, or mountain, or car, or 10th person in a photo, or part of the sky, got cut off. But then, perhaps 50% or more of the photos needed horizontal aligning, so I did some cropping of my own. Ever see the Atlantic Ocean tilting 20-30 degrees?
So, I bought a Canon 9000F Mark 2 scanner. Being a Canon camera shooter for over 40 years, I should have gone Canon in the first place. Far better build quality, far better scan quality, scanner software is piss poor. It’s version 1.00.0000. I even checked the Canon web site to see if there was a newer version. Nope. It’s not intuitive, and leaves the various scan options (Auto, print, copy, file, PDF, etc) buttons on the computer screen and one has to click the setup button to adjust options to select output file folders, names, etc. All rather difficult. And the physical buttons on the scanner, mimicking those on the computer screen, each have to be pre-set up using the computer screen options first. Throw in that once the software is set to ‘positive film’ (slides), there is NO option given to set the size. It defaults to 24mm x 35mm (35mm film). But the good news is that when scanning square image slides, it figures it out automatically and the entire image is properly scanned and brought into the computer. BUT…I encountered some large-format slides…38mm square images! Even on Auto, it couldn’t figure them out and cropped both left and right sides. I briefly tried putting them into the negative holder(s) and, set it to negatives, and it figured it all out just like it did cropping the ‘monsters’ in the first place. Can’t win.
I also got tired of waiting on my computer, especially in PSE and LR after perhaps 50-70 ‘heal’ operations. It would be 0.5 to maybe 1+ seconds behind me…even the cursor was noticeably lagging. And that was with an overclocked 4.6 ghz quad processor computer! So, I did a processor upgrade shortly after getting the Canon scanner. It’s now an overclocked 4.4 ghz 8-processor computer! (and SSD drive and 16gb RAM that didn’t need upgrading) One of the downsides of digital photography is that it takes faster and faster computers to do the editing with each new generation of cameras!
Then I took on the box of loose/bagged/boxed slides. Those were from the other side of the family, and were kept in a home in Providence RI, less than ½ mile from the ocean. Just about every one of them has mold/fungus/??? on them. Big time! Perhaps 30% of them have 20-50 light blue circles of varying sizes on them as well…plus the mold! Trying to fix a persons’ face that 2/3 is proper color, and the rest is light blue is pretty much beyond my PSE skills other than simple cloning. I think I’m averaging about 8-10 minutes PER SLIDE, but I’m suspicious it’s higher. So far, I’ve spent about 15 hours doing 90 slides.
I’m treating this nightmare in a box differently than the rest. If it’s a ho-hum picture, and the image has lost most of its sharpness, I do the best I can at simple WB and exposure, then hit it with ‘dust and scratches’ at 2 or 3mm to get rid of most of the mold problems. Shots of ‘the kids’ on the Empire State building, or the Statue of Liberty shot from the Staten Island Ferry that are 40-50% mold…sorry folks. Shots of the grandparents (in the 1950s) and other family members, I do my best at cleaning up their faces and clothing, and everything in the ‘main focal point’ of the pictures. But trying to clean up the blue tinted areas and mold beyond about the center 60% of the picture (walls, ceilings, decorations, mostly), I give them a ‘once over’ and let it go. Fortunately, there’s only 350 slides in this nightmare box.
So, what’s my point of this lengthy epistle in regards to scanning family photos?
1. They’re only family photos. While they are precious to family members, expecting or attempting to get results like they were shot yesterday with high end digital camera gear is not realistic.
2. Consider the volume of photos and slides, and spend a day or so to determine typical processing time and multiply it out. How much time do YOU want to spend on the project? As one responder noted, sending them out isn’t always the panacea one thought it would be, either.
3. I found out earlier today that I will likely get a quantity of photo albums from the ‘40s on up that have been in piles for many years. It’s already been determined that the photos cannot be removed from the cellophane covering/mounting for scanning, they’ve been pressed down for so long. Won’t THAT be fun? I guess I should be happy I won’t have to spend time unmounting/remounting them…But as I found out from the handful of loose prints that was in the nightmare box, those printed on textured paper scan as lots of very-heavy-duty white noise. I’m sure the layer of cellophane will add some new surprises.
4. In all likelihood, most of the scanned images will be viewed once by one or more individuals and then forgotten. Just like they’ve been forgotten for so many years. While I made every attempt to do a super-good job on a very limited quantity of images (for example, 45 minutes editing the only extant wedding picture of the parents in 1948), the rest get production-line processing.
The good news is that I’m now retired. So I have lots of time to devote to the process. Do you?
Edit: I also have a calibrated monitor. An absolute necessity if you're going to be editing your scans.
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