Working With Your Pictures

If your family is like mine, you probably have boxes of snapshots, portraits and albums with all kinds of pictures in them. Don't you wish you had taken the time to put the dates on them? This step of the process will probably also be time-consuming, but it will be worth it. Remember, it's better to have too many raw images to work with than not enough.

Sort Through Your Pictures

Gather all the pictures together and start sorting through them. If you have pictures that you can't identify the dates or the people, find a family member who can. When you find out the information, write it on the back of the picture. Someday, one of your descendants may be going through the same process that you are now. They will really appreciate it. Remember, all you are doing at this point is prelimnary work. All you have to do is decide whether to scan the picture or not. You can decide whether to include it in the finished product later. If you can't decide whether to scan it or not, scan it. This is especially true of pictures that have been loaned to you. Disk space is cheap. That's why you have (or should have) a ZIP drive.

Scanning the Pictures

Scan in the images and save them as TIF's only. When you scan in the image and save it, you will have the option of saving it in a number of file formats. One of the options will be to save it as a TIF or TIFF. This is best option to use. TIFs are the best option for preserving image quality. You can save them in some other format after you have worked on them with Soap or some other image enhancement/processing package. The first thing you will notice it that TIFs take up a lot of disk space real quick. Again, disk space is cheap. If you succumb to the temptation of saving them in JPG/JPEG format, you will notice that they don't use anywhere near the amount of disk space that tifs do. What you don't realize at this point is that JPGs use a "lossy" compression method. In plain English, this means that every time you save a JPG, it loses a little quality. You can save them as JPGs when you get to the final image product, but you are a ways away from that. Some of these photos are irreplaceable. Do the right thing. After you have all your pictures scanned in. make a backup of all of them and put it in a safe place. This will bail you out when you accidentally delete one. It's a whole lot easier to make a backup than it is to get the photo and make another trip to Kinko's for one picture (I say this from personal experience).

Catalog the Pictures

Use the image cataloging software you have to make an electronic album of all your pictures so you can find them. You may want to break your pictures into categories based on chronological order or subject. If you have tons of pictures, breaking them down into some kind of grouping makes the whole process a lot easier to manage.

Processing the Pictures

By the time you have all the pictures scanned in, you should have some idea of what your final project is going to be like. Armed with this information, you can probably begin to do image enhancement, color correction, etc., on a lot of the pictures you have just scanned in. This is probably the most fun of the entire project. It is very rewarding to take an old, faded, torn picture and bring it back to life. Before you work with any picture, make a copy of it wnd work with the copy, not the original. Don't worry about resizing the image at this point. In particular, don't make them any smaller. You can always make them smaller later. On the other hand making a small image larger will almost always generate some loss in image quality. You can resize them to fit your printed document or web site later. After you are done working your magic, save it as a tif.

That's about all you can do with the pictures at this point. You will be doing more later.

A Final Note About Pictures: After you have all your picutres gathered up and have enhanced them as much as you are going to, have them "burned" onto a CD-ROM. Pictures, especially color pictures, fade with time. A CD-Rom doesn't. You can probably find a service bureau or a friend that has a CD writer. It shouldn't cost that much, and will essentially store the images forever.

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