I am about to make a family chronicle with a lot of old photos. The older ones are of course baryte paper prints which have a nice rough surface.
Scanning the first photos, I find that there is too much light on the shadows, and the surface structure results in tiny white stripes and spots, reflections which show the paper structure but may be disturbing when the photos are viewed in the book. With the Gimp I can easily compress the shadows a bit so that black becomes black, but the tiny spots remain. The scanning tablet from the TWAIN interface for this scanner (an office Brother 3-in-1) only allows for tweaking brightness and contrast. I didn't find any other option to scan, and I don't know if it's usual to set up brightness and contrast accordingly, and how. (And I don't know whether you would scan in 24bit colours or in grayshades for black-and-white photos...) So there are actually 2 problems: There is no automatic for finding the right black value point, and there is the problem that the lamp lights the paper structure too much. I tried to turn the photos by 90?, but to no avail. What would you guys do here? I don't want to scan 100+ photos only to see that it was a fail, so I ask before I actually start working :) Is there a chance to install another, more intelligent scan tablet or TWAIN interface? And would you accept the lights on the paper structure as given, maybe "nice to look at"? Thanks for your opinions! Rolf
