Photos & photo albums

doodah

doodah

doodah

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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London
I *think* this is more of a GD thread. My family photo collection is basically a hundreds of photos in a plastic bag :o and I want to do something about it. First of all I would like to make a nice album for my mum.

A colleague made an amazing album using iPhoto. My first question is.....is there a service/software that can replicate this for Windows? Seen a couple but they look really basic and naff.

Obviously I need to digitise all the pictures, tried scanning the photos. They seemed to have come out OK but could probably do with some touching up. Any software recommendations. Or any recommendations for a service/company that can do this?

Many thanks.
 
Hundreds of photos will cost lots and lots for a company to digitise them for you.

Getting a decent scanner is probably best.
 
I'm not sure about digitising them, but check out Lightroom for editing. Not sure how it will cope with scanned images, but it's one of the best editors. Grab a 30 day trial.
 
There are plenty of services out there offering photobooks, though you get what you pay for in most cases.

With hundreds of photos, you would be easiest just sticking them in a traditional photo album. Presumably you don't want to go down that route as you want to give a present, but retain them for yourself?

As Gilly says, it would be costly to have them scan them for you. So your options are either scan them all yourself, which would be very time consuming, or if you still have film negatives, you could get DVD copies made, which is likely cheaper than them scanning photos, but still going to cost a fair bit for so any.
 
I have absolutely no experience with Lightroom and minimal experience with PS. Assume I can look up a photo retouching guide and make a macro?

Gilly - I probably only need to digitise the ones I need for the album for now. Probably best to do in batches any way - would dread the thought of sending them all off and them getting lost.
 
I am just using a standard 3 in 1 at work, some photos are fairly good and others are a little washed.

vov5i1.jpg
 
With the washed out photos, I would suggest increasing contrast in lightroom or PS to bring back some of the definition. I would also try desaturating the yellows/reds a bit in the couple shot on the bottom-left to make their faces less orange.

Otherwise, the quality looks decent enough.
 
xibinim said:
I have absolutely no experience with Lightroom and minimal experience with PS. Assume I can look up a photo retouching guide and make a macro?
Click to expand...

Not really, you might be able to make macros for some of the steps you might needs, for example creating levels adjustment lasyers etc but each and every photo is likely to need a different set of steps to prepare for print!

xibinim said:
I am just using a standard 3 in 1 at work, some photos are fairly good and others are a little washed.

vov5i1.jpg
Click to expand...

Looking at those 4 images I'd say they are all easily retouched (baring in mind I use Photoshop every day for preparing photos for print, and have been using Photoshop for about 16 years...so I know what I'm doing!)

Top left, would pretty much just need a Levels Adjustment layer, to adjust the black level which would remove the haziness and give good contrast, then some fairly simple cloning to remove the date (something which I can't stand!)

Top Right:Again a simple levels adjustment layer will sort out the contrast etc and give a nice pic.

Bottom Left: I'd use a couple of adjustment layers, both would be Levels, one wI'd use to improve the contrast, the other to sort the white balance of the faces a little so they are less affected by the lighting which was present and looks unnatural.

Both right: Levels adjustment to bring out a little detail in the trees but also remove the haziness on them.

All pretty simple stuff and would make a huge difference to the pictures.



Tips for scanning:

Scan images separately, trust me it may seem more fiddly/time consuming than loading the scan bed and scanning several at once but believe me, it's much less annoying than having to copy and past sections from a bulk scan like that and then creating a new document and pasting it in and then saving!!!

Scan at a higher dpi than the final image will need to use then change the print resolution in PS, this gives you a nice large image to work with. I scan at 600dpi and the printers I use (and most commerical printers) will print at 300dpi, this means I have a lovely large image to play with and of course downsizing in page setting software is always preferable to enlarging!
 
Thanks for your help guys. My house mate can help with the touching up as he is a don with PS etc. Think I will just stick to the ones I will use for mu mum's album (<50).
 
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