Digitizing Your Photos, Slides, and Negatives - Beginning Photo Retouching and Restoration Using GIMP - page 36

4. Next, select the Crop t ool (Shift + C) and trim away the excess area around the

image. Compared to the before example, it now looks much better (Figure 2-16 ).

Figure 2-16. A before-and-after comparison

Summary
In this chapter, you learned that acquiring your photographic materials as digital images is the first step in
the editing process, so it should be done as well as possible. There are choices as to whether to hire this task
out or do it yourself, depending on what best suits you. When scanning your own photographic prints, dust
removal is important, as is acquiring sufficient image data by scanning at the right resolution.
With a good tripod (or copy stand) and camera, you can digitize large images. It's also possible to scan
some larger photos in sections and to reassemble them as complete images.
Transparencies require an especially high degree of dust and dirt removal, because everything is
captured by the scanner. Auto-settings, while not always ideal, can speed up the process of handling large
quantities of transparencies. You also discovered that transparencies requiring high-resolution scanning
capture the maximum image data.
Images will sometimes have to be straightened out after scanning, because of having an irregular shape
or being shot at odd angles in the first place.
GIMP can easily fix tilted images and much, much more, as you'll see as we proceed into Part II of
this topic.