And I’ve got a present for the folks. They’ve got a new scanner and a loverly digital camera, and we’ve got quite a large amount of pictures to deal with, everything from three years of auto show digital photos (My father works with Mercedes Benz), to pictures of my great-great grandfather. What’s the best thing to do to A: Organize them? B: Scan over a century of photos. Perhaps we should have professionals do it? What sort of professionals? C: Light photomanipulation software for the digital pictures, resize, crop, and what have you?
Maybe this belongs in General Questions. It started out asking what kind of digital photo manipulation software was best, for simple photo retouching for nontechnical people… Then I just folded too many questions into it.
I don’t like software that comes with cameras and scanners (I’ll use their red-eye reduction occasionally, but that’s it), I’d rather be in control of where my files go. I have a directory called “Photos” and then I make sub-directories for each category (cats, family, my wife and me, friends, sceneries, apartment, videos, etc). This way I am in direct control of my photos.
It shouldnt be too hard to scan pictures, the best way is to just load the scanner bed up with 5 or 6 (however many you can fit), scan them, then open the picture in something like Lview or Infraview and cut/paste/crop each picture into it’s own file. I’ll then view all my photos with ACDSee. I wouldn’t waste money on having someone else do them unless you’ve got 10,000 photos and they’ll do it for cheap.
I use PaintShop Pro for working with my digital and scanned photos. It is not as powerful as Photoshop, but I can afford it. And with practice, you can do quite a bit with it. Of course, after doing a couple of dozen scans, you want to go back to the beginning and redo the first ones, because now you know what you are doing.
I can’t help you with organizing software. There are several out there, but I have never really done anything with them.
To follow up on mblackwell’s suggestion, Adobe Photoshop Elements is wonderful. Much of the power of Photoshop but for under $90. In addition to the photo manipulation features you get a nice photo brower function too that can help you organize your scans.
Paint Shop Pro is good, it will probably do anything they need for general photo editing or web graphics. It’s main disadvantage (IMO) is that it can’t handle huge image files (hundreds of megs), but then they say it’s intended for “web graphics” that aren’t ever that big. Photoshop Elements and PhotoImpact I’ve never used. Anything less is probably missing useful features though, so consider ~$100 to be the floor price here.
I tried GIMP on Win98, it crashed a lot. And had no instructions.
…
Anyway, as for the photos: scanning them once isn’t going to hurt them any, as long as they’re already flat. If they are curled and you will need to flatten them to scan them, don’t do anything to them yourself: call or take them to someone who does photo restoration.
~
As a photoshop and psp user I can reccommend psp with no qualms whatsoever. It is a great piece of software. Since you say this is for less computer-savvy people, photoshop is like giving them a shotgun to kill some flies. Photoshop Elements I have yet to try, but it could be a very good option.
Just a hint on the scanning issue, somone suggested scanning a load of pics at once. The tech might have evolved since I bought my last scanner (a good 5 years ago I will admit), but I found that scanning a lot at a time messed up the “exposure”, especially if the pics being scanned varied in contrast from eachother. If you are using the presets on the scanner, you might like to see if you get better colour balance/contrast results from scanning one at a time.
Sorting, filtering, filing, viewing, file renaming and simple image manipulation (crops, rotation, and basic enhance steps) Very user friendly IMHO and all for a low price.
PSP is also an excellent piece of software, recognizing that it cost about 1/6 of what Adobe PS does.
And with practice, you can do quite a bit with it. Of course, after doing a couple of dozen scans, you want to go back to the beginning and redo the first ones, because now you know what you are doing.