While scanning my cousin’s photos and negatives last month, I came across photos/negatives from other people that I knew or had been paid to photograph them. I decided that now is the time to address the issue of 13 large boxes full to the brim with catalogued negatives and photographs in colour and black and white dating from 1960 up to 2002.
In one month I have managed to empty only one carton. The way that I work is this: I pull out the manila folder, check the date and the content and decide if I shred or not. If I decide to keep it the first thing that I do is to create a file folder on my desktop with the name of the person/place/thing, then scan in the negs or photo at 800DPI (1200DPI took too long to scan) in a TIFF (non-lossy) format on my Epson Photo 4990.
I open Adobe Photoshop Elements and minimize it so it sits on the bottom dock.
I retrieve the file folder from the desktop.
Once I’ve done that I hit shift/click on the photos that I want to open. Then I right click on the photos and choose “Open with Photoshop”.
Bingo! The photos are in Photoshop ready to be manipulated. I choose the first one, using “Levels”, and slide the arrows on the Black/White/Grey until I am satisfied with the photo. Then I blow the photo up to 100 per cent and slowly scan the image for dust marks, scratches, and anything that needs Cloning or the magic BandAaid.
I save the image as an 8” x 10” 300 DPI TIFF file in the same folder.
I go back to the image, choose the brush with my copyright on it and stamp the photo then I re-size the photo to 4” x 6” at 75 or 100DPI, save the photo as a JPG on the floating on the desktop. This image is small enough to e-mail someone (and not have them wait for 10 minutes until it downloads while they curse your name) or even put on Facebook or on Craigslist.
If it is a photo of a person then I try to find an e-mail or private message them on Facebook and include the 100 DPI photos. When I am sure that the person has received the small format photos then I proceed to shred the negs and or photos (I keep one photo aside for me).
Some people have contacted me wanting larger DPI images so that they would be able to blow the photos up so I send them the large DPI TIFF photos.….now you know the reason why I have saved the photos as two separate files, one large DPI file to blow up and on small DPI file to e-mail.
I then save the file folders on a separate external 2-terrabyte hard drive.
Editor’s note: This will be the final Digi Pixels column as Norman Silverstone will be moving away from the Alberni Valley. We have appreciated his column running in our newspaper for the past few years and wish him all the best. His work can be seen on his website at www.silverstonephotos.com
