Scanning old photos - Advise please

_Whimsical_

I'm not sure that this is the right place , but I will persist anyway...
I want to retouch /clean up some old family photos using photoshop. They are black and white and were taken in the 1950s. They're in reasonable condition except for scratches and sellotape marks. However they are very small. Around 2.5inchs x 1.5. I'd like to make them a little bigger but it isn't absolutely essential. I was just wondering if scanning them in using an average (aldi bought!) home scanner would be adequete. Is there anything else that I can do as far as scanning in goes that will preserve more of their quality so that I might be able to enlarge them more ?
Any advise welcome !

leinsterman

Do you have the negatives ?

If yes then it would be better to scan these and convert them ... this will give you better resolution and you won't have to worry about selotape marks etc ...

If no then your obviously stuck with the originals ... they key here is to scan using the highest resolution your scanner will give you ... use the twain acquire in photoshop and it will scan directly to psd format ... you can convert to JPEG later ...

I can't say anything about the quality of your Aldi scanner but if you want better quality then try giving Gunn's of Wexford St a call ... ask for Fiona (she does all their developing work) and se if they can do it for you ...

haz

chilly wrote:

However they are very small. Around 2.5inchs x 1.5. I'd like to make them a little bigger but it isn't absolutely essential.

If you can take a decent scan at a true optical 1200 pixels per inch, then your images (3.75 square inches) will be about 6 megapixels, which is probably more detail than the originals, but easy to work with. Any scanner should be okay for what you are working with. Dust them and clean the glass. Some people might iron out wrinkles (with clean white paper between the iron and the photo) or wash the dirt off them, but that might be a once-ever procedure with unpredictably destructive results - I have washed and ironed prints if I have a copy or a negative.

Switch off any intelligent stuff in the scanner software, like unsharp mask, and use either the greatest bit depth grey or 24-bit colour. Even though the image is (to your eyes) monochrome, having a colour file format gives you more options to play with in your image package.

Depending on the content, you might find treating them with a really wide unsharp mask (say 100 pixels) and then a narrow one (say 20 pixels) is effective, but don't overdo the strength. You should easily get an 8 by 10 inch print if the originals are reasonable quality. Laser printing onto linen-effect, water-colour or other textured paper would probably look better than inkjet prints on photo paper.

_Whimsical_

Thank you both very much for the help. I'm relatively new to this so I'll probably be back needing more. I'll bear the advice in mind! Any more tips also very welcome by the way