I’ve recently come into possession of about 10 old family photos. All but one are black and white, some with some yellowing. I scanned them and put them up on a website so I could send them to my aunt that way before I had copies made.
She saw them and would like copies of the pictures. I tried Kinko’s, which gave me decent images, but the colors seemed off - this was using their Sony scan/print machine thingy. Some came out almost greenish, others significantly yellower than the original.
Except for two, the originals are all on non-glossy paper - they’re from the 1940’s and perhaps the early 50’s. One is late 60’s or 70’s - it’s color and the print from Kinko’s came out ok as far as color on that one.
I’m thinking about going specifically to a camera type shop to see if they can do better from the originals - I’d like my aunt to get copies that are close to the originals - are camera shops (say, Wolf Camera) good places to get things like this done? Any other suggestions/opinions/experiences?
I’ll tell ya…we had really great luck with Walgreens. It was cheap, fast, and very nice copies. Give it a try. If it’s not quite what you were looking for, you can always try Wolfe.
Yeah, the Sony PictureStation has a big problem with slightly yellowed photographs; it interprets the color all sorts of funny ways. I get a lot of customer complaints about that, but I haven’t figured out a way to fix it. In the past week or so Sony released a patch CD that enables you to tell the scanner that the image is black and white before you scan it; if you do that, it cuts down on the difference a little, but even under the best of circumstances it prints slightly green-toned photos. Have you tried using their regular color copier? In our store, at least, I’ve noticed that it works a lot better for aged or sepia prints than the Sony does despite the slight gap in technology levels.
Photo places can usually do copies, but IIRC they do it by setting up a copy stand and using one of their cameras to take a photo of YOUR photo, and printing from that negative. I’m not sure what the charges run for that.
Or, if you’re willing to try the Sony again, save your scans (in a high resolution, 300dpi or so) to a floppy disk or CD and print from that. It’s much truer to digital color than it is when it scans.
I guess it depends on how much they are worth to you to get them color corrected. I would think that a photographer could scan and color correct them with Photoshop. I just don’t know how much they would charge for that service. You would be surprised what can be done to restore old photos with digital software.