Stuff is various scanning-related bits and pieces. Currently:
- Restoration of old prints
- Using Vuescan with an Epson 1660 Photo scanner to scan black and white negatives
- Using Photoshop Elements 7 to deal with the Kodachrome's wide dynamic range: One hump or two?
- Transposing sheet music
Restoration of old prints
I do not offer the service of restoring your old prints. And when scanning slides and negatives I will spend a couple of minutes trying to improve the picture and getting rid of the worst blemishes if I can, but will not go further than that.If you have old photographs that are torn, damaged, blemished or faded, or if I have done scans for you that need more restoration work, I would strongly recommend that you email (based in London).
Here's a sample of his work.
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Using Vuescan with an Epson 1660 Photo scanner to scan black and white negatives
I've spent a while working out how to scan negative strips using Vuescan with an Epson 1660 Photo scanner and thought I'd offer my findings to the wider world in case anyone is interested in doing the same thing.I used to find general scanning simple in that Preview and Scan were separate actions. The scanner previewed automatically at the start. You set the crop and then did Scan. But things got more sophisticated and if you are using Vuescan you can choose to Preview, you can choose to Scan and you can also choose to 'Scan from Preview' which isn't as straightforward as it might look at first.
So for anyone who has tussled with how to use this, you might be interested to see the workflow that I have used for scanning filmstrips. The filmstrips were black and white negatives and varied between two and six frames.
The method I am using is to scan all the frames at once. This involves three passes:
1 - preview (called Preview) to see what you've got overall.
2 - scan (called Preview) only the area you want.
3 - crop and save (called Scan) the bits you want.
OK, first thing is the initial settings; these are what I used (I'm not mentioning all the defaults, file locations and obvious settings):
INPUT
Mode: Transparency
Media: B/W Negative
Make Gray from: Auto
Preview Resolution: 200 dpi [If you don't see Preview Resolution, set Scan from Preview to None and then it should appear.]
Scan Resolution: 1600 dpi
Rotate: Right
Mirror: Unchecked
Auto save: Scan
Scan from Preview: None (initial setting only, this will be changed)
Lock Exposure: Unchecked
CROP
Crop Size: 35mm Film
Auto rotate: Unchecked
Preview area: Maximum (initial setting only, this will be changed)
FILTER
None of these settings used. All these settings can be tailored better in post-scan processing.
COLOR
Color Balance: White Balance
B/W Vendor/Brand/Type: don't slavishly put Ilford, Agfa: it's worth experimenting.
OUTPUT
Auto file name: Checked
TIFF File name: eg BW001+.tif
TIFF File: Checked
PREFERENCES
Auto refresh: no
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That's all set up. Now the Workflow.
Clean the glass. Put on your cotton gloves. If they are white this will make you look like Mickey Mouse but carry on anyway.
START OF PROCESS
1.
Place filmstrip in holder, shiny side down, emulsion side up, with the first frame at the number 1 marked on the film holder. Brush gently and/or spray with compressed air.
Place film holder on scanner glass.
2.
If the strips vary from one to six frames do 2a. If the strips are all 6 frames do 2b:
2a.
Set CROP-Preview-area to Maximum.
Set SCAN-Scan-from-preview to None.
Press Preview Button. [This will do a very quick preview to show you where the frames are.]
Stretch the crop box around all the frames. Generally if you are stretching the previous 35mm crop, you only need to stretch it sideways, not up and down.
Set CROP-Preview-area to Crop Box.
Set SCAN-Scan-from-preview to Always.
2b.
Set CROP-Preview-area to Maximum.
Set SCAN-Scan-from-preview to Always.
[Question: If with a 6-frame strip the crop box is the full length of the total area but you crop (as in 2a) to the 35mm film size, then surely you cut out about two thirds of the Maximum area and this would reduce the scan-time? Answer: Well apparently not - I timed both operations and they come out at 3.5 minutes each.
3.
Press Preview Button. [Although called a preview this is your main scan of all your frames at the top resolution. This is the only slow bit. But if you have reduced the Preview Area to a smaller number of frames, this reduces the scan and therefore the time for the scan to the minimum needed.]
Set CROP-crop-size to 35m film.
Hold down SHIFT and drag the crop box to the frame you want (The first is usually on the the RIGHT hand side.)
Zoom in more and using SHIFT, position the crop box exactly.
Press Refresh. Play with the COLOR-B/W vendor etc settings. When ready...
Press Scan Button. (This will quickly apply your settings and save the file.)
Using SHIFT, move the crop box to the next frame and press Scan Button.
When all frames have been done...
Go back to START OF PROCESS for the next strip.
If anyone has used this and found it useful or has any other suggestions I would be very pleased to hear from you.
Other tips: I like to check the COLOR-Pixel colors box to see where any blacks or whites are blown out. Also I like to set the COLOR-White Point to zero so that I don't lose any detail at the white end. Then all the information is there and I can level the lighter and darker areas separately afterwards.
Oh and why did I use the Epson which is an excellent machine but has only 1600dpi and doesn't come with Digital Ice, when I have a Nikon Coolscan? The answer is that Digital Ice doesn't work with black and white negatives, and the Coolscan with its harsher LED light source will show up every blemish loud and clear. So if your B/W negatives are scratched or scuffed, it can actually be advantageous to use the more diffused light source of a flatbed scanner like the Epson.
Using Photoshop Elements to deal with narrow and wide dynamic range: One hump or two?
All that follows on Photoshop Elements/Photoshop is extremely standard stuff to real Photoshoppers. This is really aimed at people who want to fix problems in their photos - any photos - and have never really got the hang of 'levels' and histograms. The problems I'm thinking of are photos that are too dark or too light or too dull or a mixture of these. You may have tried to fix them with other software by altering settings of brightness and contrast but without much success and now maybe you've got Photoshop Elements but its secrets seem just that bit hidden.What I want to start with is 'levels'. Open a photo in Photoshop Elements and choose Enhance > Adjust Light > Levels and you'll see a histogram. This is a graph showing where the light and dark areas of the picture are. If it's a good photo the graph shows an even spread from black on the left to white on the right.
Narrow range. One hump
Now if the picture is very dark all over you will see one hump on the left hand side. If the picture is very light you will see one hump on the right hand side. If the picture is plain dull you will see a narrow hump in the middle. Underneath you will see a black triangle, a grey triangle and a white triangle. These are used to set what's called the black point, the mid point and the white point. All you do is move the black triangle to the beginning of the hump and the white one to the end of the hump. and look at the result. The photo is likely to be transformed and look much better. Further adjustment can be achieved by sliding the grey triangle one way or the other. Experiment.Wide range. Two humps
But what if there are some bright areas and some dark areas? Two humps? If the humps are pretty well joined in the middle you can treat them as one hump. But if the middle bit goes right down to zero for a bit then you've got a problem. This sort of thing arises particularly after scanning Kodachrome slides which typically have a very wide dynamic range. So for a start, using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements you find you can adjust the levels by shifting the white point and black point in two ways. You can either adjust it so that the all the detail is visible in the shadows in which case the bright areas all run into one with light blues turning green, OR, you can adjust it so that the bright areas are just right in which case the shadow detail is lost.Clearly global levels is not what you need.
There are lots of ways of using differential levels. You can select areas using the marquee tool with a wide feathering. You can try to get a more detailed result using the Quick Selection tool but I find this tends to put odd artefacts around the edges. (If you know how to do this without getting strange effects around the edges, close-up, I'd be interested to hear from you). You can do the global levelling on each of two layers and use a big eraser to remove what you don't want.
With a bit of experimentation I came up with the following sequence. I would be pleased to receive comments from any Photoshop experts out there. It doesn't always provide the answer but I've often found it useful.
Using Photoshop Elements 7:
Open your image.
Create an adjustment layer of LEVELS. Adjust the levels so that the dark areas are exactly right but of course any bright blue/white areas turns to greenish-dazzle.
Then Select All.
Copy-Merged.
ALT-click the white mask-box on the Adjustment layer and Paste this image onto the mask. Filter-Adjustments-Invert. The mask now holds a black and white negative version of the image and it is through ths mask that the Adjustment layer operates.
Now look at both layers and the job is done!
Select all layers and merge them with CTRL-E.
Transposing sheet music
What's this got do with scanning? Well if you have some sheet music that you need transposing - nothing too complex - I can scan it and transpose it for you.This is something you can do yourself. I probably can't do it much better than anybody else but I've at least got used to using the software which takes anybody a while. Anyway there are several packages that can do the job. The one I use is Music Publisher from Braeburn Software which I can highly recommend.
OCR is optical character recognition. If you scan a text document you get an image of the page. For all the computer knows the image is an image - it might just as well be a country scene. OCR is the process of going through the image and trying to recognise words in a particular language. When it has recognised all the words it can it gives you a file of the words that your word processor can read. When that has been done successfully you can then edit the document in your word processor. But if the original document was a bit scrappy, such as old newsprint, the OCR process can go badly wrong and serve up a whole lot of rubbish. If it's medium bad, you get a lot of correct stuff and also a lot of garbage and you can if you like go through it manually and correct it.
Scanning music is no different. Even perfect originals can throw up odd bits and missing bits when it is interpreted by the OCR engine.
So it's a time consuming business. I don't have an A3 scanner so if the original is bigger than A4 I have to do it in two halves. If the original is in poor condition then I would probably have to abandon it if the result of the scan is unworkable.
Now we all know that 'Photocopying music is wrong' and I have no wish to fall foul of anyone's copyright. But I am happy to use a scan to produce a transposed version which is often needed by choirs and instrumentalists.
In my own case I help out with doing a sing-song for a residential home. Wartime music is of course very popular for this sort of group and here's a bit of 'Take me Back to Dear Old Blighty' for example. Click on the images if you want to see larger versions.
The top note of the tune is E flat and the residents were struggling with reaching it. Well no, they didn't struggle; they declared that it's way too high. Now I can't sight-read and transpose and smile at everybody at the same time (I have some difficulty doing all these things separately), so I put the music through the scanner and put it down from B flat to G. Then everyone was happy.
You may notice that while it does the job for the pianist, the line of do-re-mis in the original has gone because it was so garbled in the scan.
So what I'm offering is admittedly an imperfect, hit-and-miss service, but it may well be a life-saver for any group that can't hit the top notes or any instrumentalists trying to marry up two or more disparate instruments.I would charge £5 per sheet if it is straightforward, or possibly more at the rate of £5 per hour if it isn't. If it's going to be more than £5 I'll give you a quote before continuing. If I fail miserably I shall of course let you know and charge nothing.
Email me if you are interested at .