My ongoing project to scan every photo I can find continues. I’m almost done with shoebox one. I’ve found all of my old school photos, save for 2nd and 3rd grades. Perhaps money was tight and we didn’t have the funds to score prints? Or I was so smart they skipped me from 1st to 4th grade?
Anywho, the scanning continues. As does my wish I had dropped more coin for a better scanner, as there’s only so much you I can do in Photoshop CS3 with setting a ridiculously low black point in Image > Adjustments > Curves and blurring the crap out of shadow noise in Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise. Meh.
Oh, and don’t get me started on scanning that crappy embossed photo paper that was all the rage in the 70s and 80s. Unless you scan in multiple directions and perfectly merge the scans together, you end up with a dot pattern across the entire image. Thankfully, Image > Mode > Lab Color and Filter > Noise > Median on the Lightness channel works fairly well. The more accurate FFT process requires an OSX-compatible plug-in, of which there are few, and those few are pricey, so that’s right out.
Cheap and lazy FTW, I guess.
