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mhnw43365
11th April 2012, 01:06 AM
I am trying to convert my Mum and Dad’s Wedding photo album from 1971 into a more modern photobook the album has black and white prints roughly 10x8 and about half of them are also printed separately in colour roughly 5x3 the colour prints are printed as the same sort of texture and finish as you would get from a old Polaroid very glossy and smooth and they seem to have scanned fine, at 600 ppi

However the black and white bigger prints are printed in a different way if you look really closely there are many, many dots making up the print (sort of like a newspaper but really really good quality and sharpe) However when I am scanning them at 600 ppi the dots become very clear and also it looks like the images have lots of light and dark stripes some images vertical and others diagonal, even when viewed at 15-20% they still show up,
I have sort of solved this using photoshop by adding as much surface blur as possible without losing to much detail, however this takes time, as each imagine is slight different so the blur needs to be set different for each one also there is the problem of the lose of sharpness mainly the big group photos were the subjects are much smaller this is noticeable,

I am wondering is there a better way for me to scan these images, I currently just open MS Paint and file and import from scanner or camera then set it to 600 ppi as this is the max it will allow me, my scanner is a Lexmark 2600, once the images has scanned to paint I just save as a JPEG I then use photoshop to do any editing.

Does the software in my case MS Paint effect the scan or is this down solely to the scanner itself, would I be better using another program or would the scan turn out the same regardless? Is there a certain way to scan photos printed with dots making up the imagine?

Thanks
Lee

paulmag
11th April 2012, 01:26 AM
I would be tempted to use better software it sounds like the B&W are being given a halftone.

Not sure what you are doing with the mono shots sounds like the are being treated as Black and white..............no shades of grey

http://www.photography-forum.org/showthread.php/64488-Whats-the-best-to-Software-to-edit-my-photos?p=684331#post684331

mhnw43365
11th April 2012, 01:30 AM
do u have any suggestion for software I only use paint as thats all i have ever used and I always thought it was the scanner that did the work,

paulmag
11th April 2012, 01:41 AM
do u have any suggestion for software I only use paint as thats all i have ever used and I always thought it was the scanner that did the work,

see previous post

when scanning use greyscale 16bit for B&W

Download the gimp its free and works ok or a trial of a commercial program probably adobe elements not to expensive see link above

tenchy
11th April 2012, 08:16 AM
are the bands you are seeing moire patterns. what do the scanned images look like zoomed to 100%

GarryN
11th April 2012, 09:08 AM
Have you considered photographing them rather than scanning them?

I made some successful photos of my father-in-laws WWII navy photos for a memorial book when he died a couple of years ago, they came out quite well and reproduced in a book perfectly.

paulmag
11th April 2012, 09:42 AM
Ok here is what I believe you are doing

The colour scan 24bit you are fine with where you are going wrong is with the grey scale confusing it with a black and white :)

below are 2 images a 16bit greyscale and a 1bit black and white where the shades are made by pattern the example below is probably a lot coarser than you are getting it depends on the settings used.

147356

147357

mhnw43365
11th April 2012, 09:57 AM
No, I am scanning them as colour photo, I have tried black and white and greyscale but the colour ones are a better quility,

i have had a closer look at it does look more like the texture of the print paper/card then actually a mono print

Jeremy S E Rundle
11th April 2012, 12:09 PM
Try applying a median filter to begin with in post processing

oldgeezer
11th April 2012, 06:00 PM
You will get better results from Photographing them.