My Digital Dark-room

 

Home Scan

Edited Image

Original  Image

Professionals Scan

Edited  Image

Original  Image

From time to time it is needed to edit photos to make them better.  Above, you can see how it goes when a photo has got a bad scanning from the film.

The photo above,  is shot with a Mamiya/Sekor 500TL and a Tamrom 400 mm lens.  And Edited with  Paint Shop Pro.

The upper photo scan, is done by a Minolta "Home scanner" for film.  After scanning, the photos was burned to a CD record and stored in Tiff- format.  Before using the image, it was slightly edited in PSP. Just to remove some dots made by dust on the film.

The other scan,  was done by a professional lab.  And the order was placed when I dropped in at a local photo store to pick the processed photos.  I told them that I wanted high resolution and quality, put on CD record.  File size about 25 - 30 Mb.

The photos I got back had lower resolution and was in file format = JPEG!
This was way out of line from what I had expected.  The quality was various.  Some was ok, some was bad.  and the price was high.  almost 12 NOK / photo, total of  265.  (  $ 1,5 USD / photo, total  31,5  USD  ).
I was told when I ordered that it would cost 96 NOK,  but later they told me that 96 was for the CD record only!!  Hey man!  I can get records at the computer store for almost 1/10 of that price!

OK, this was what I did to that photo to put it on this page:
First I loaded it from the CD into the PSP program and saved it as a TIFF file. 
Than I started removing the "noise" using different filters and functions in  PSP.  
After that, I adjusted the contrast and lightness and resized the photo.
Than I saved the edit under a different name and compressed it to JPEG again. and saved it to disk:
Now I closed the edit and reloaded the first one to resize and make it a JPEG again.  and saved it once more.
The rest is history.

My conclusion is:
If you got the plan to digitalize your films do not make them as JPEG files.
If you plan to let  professionals do it:  Make sure they know what to do and how to do it.
Make sure to make the images as TIFF files or in Kodak Photo format.  If they should try to enhance the images in JPEG format.  You can be sure that they will get worse each time they are saved.

Manipulating Images