Digitizing Your Photos, Slides, and Negatives - Beginning Photo Retouching and Restoration Using GIMP - page 21

Chapter 2

Digitizing Your Photos, Slides,
and Negatives

In This Chapter
Acquiring Your Digital Images •

• Starting with a Clean Scan

• Scanning Photographs

• Digitizing Large Images

• Scanning Slides and Negatives

• Straightening and Cropping Your Images

Acquiring Your Digital Images
As you're mastering the exercises in this topic, you might be eager to try your newly acquired skills on your
own images. Getting your images into a digital format is the first step toward the image editing process. You
can either hire the task out or do it yourself—which, I presume, will be the choice of the majority of those
reading this topic.
If you are going to work only with relatively small photographic prints (8" × 10" or less), a basic model
scanner will be adequate. If you plan to digitize transparencies such as slides and negatives, you'll need a
multi-format flatbed scanner. These models will digitize transparencies as well as photos. Some models will
handle medium- and large-format negatives, such as 4" × 5". There are also dedicated scanners for digitizing
mounted slides (in a 2" × 2" mount) and 35mm negatives.
A tripod and good digital camera are useful tools for digitizing large images, as you'll see shortly. You'll
be able to comfortably digitize portraits up to 16" × 20".

Starting with a Clean Scan
Because it's likely that the image you are scanning requires some type of digital repair, it's logical to assume
that you don't want to add even more dreck to remove. I make it a habit to keep a can of compressed air
(or a bulb brush), a can of foam-type glass cleaner, and a clean cloth near my scanner (Figure 2-1 ). There's
no need to digitally edit out a small hair or stray ball of dust from your image, when you can avoid scanning it