Scanning and Digital Photo Resources on the Internet

Digital Image Printing Services

Digital images are great, but in the end, you are going to want prints of at least some of your images. The great thing about digital is that you get to pick which ones! Also, you get to pick the print sizes, choose cropping and print in formats other than standard photo prints. Where do you start?

Listed below are just a few of the many services available to produce prints, posters, shirts, calendars, and just about anything else you can imagine from your digital images. Generally, you upload your digital images to the service and have prints back in a few days in the mail or in as few as a couple of hours by picking them up at a local retail outlet, depending on the service. You also can carry a CD or other media with your digital images into many photo processing centers and walk out with prints minutes later.

Kodak*	Dotphoto*	Adorama*	Ritz Camera*
Mpix*	Shutterfly*	Target*	Costco*

• Flying Sam Digital Photo Guide* This site has information on many great things you can do with your digital images including many pointers to photo finishing services where you can get just about anything printed from your digital images. Well worth exploring if you are new to digital imaging or you are looking for great gift ideas.

Online Photo Sharing Services

There are a large number of services on the internet that allow you to share your digital images with family and friends. Most of the photo printing companies provide this capability. Many are free and also provide services like photo printing. We list a few of these services below.

Digital Image Editing Software

You now have a bunch of digital images, but to your eye they might not be perfect. You may want to crop them, lighten the exposure a bit (Yes, you can do that!), or edit out that ugly telephone pole that appears to be sticking out of Mom's head.

There is a wide variety of software available to edit your digital images. They vary in sophistication and expense greatly. Some of the online photo printing services provide tools that you can use online (e.g., Dotphoto). Some dedicated programs are listed below:

• Adobe Photoshop CS* The standard. Complete, and powerful, but not cheap and a significant learning curve. Fully automatable for managing large numbers of images.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements* Photoshop for the rest of us. Quite powerful, but significantly less expensive than Photoshop CS. Good basic editing capabilities including image layers, standard image manipulation tools (levels, curves) and a ton of filters. Lacks many of the fancy tools of its big brother (e.g., does not have any automation capabilities, crippled color management support). You might have received this software when you bought your digital camera.
• GIMP* The GNU Image Manipulation Program. This free software has lots of the same tools as Photoshop. Probably not yet ready for the masses but worth exploring if you are a technical type.

Digital Image Organization Software

A significant benefit of digital images over slides and prints is the easy manner with which you can annotate the images with names, dates, places and comments. You can also organize your photos into albums without the usual restrictions of prints or slides; images can be in more than one album simultaneously!

These software packages let you create a set of categories and assign each image to as many categories as you would like (allows you to quickly do things like "show all the photos of Cousin Joe taken at the lake").

There are a variety of software packages available to help you organize your collection of digital images and create albums. We list a few of them here. Need help choosing the right package for you? Give us a call and we can try to help!

• Google's Picasa* Free and reasonably powerful. Includes basic image editing capabilities and lots of automatic photo retouching tools. Creates timelines views of your images, slide shows and burns CDs with slideshows. This one is worth exploring.
• Photools IMatch* Powerful, flexible image management tool. Very inexpensive for it's abilities. Steep learning curve, but you will never exceed its capabilities. Full scripting interface and full-featured RAW file format support. Used by many professional and serious amateur photographers.
• Adobe Album* Straight-forward image organization tool from the leaders in digital imaging software. This program does not do it all, but is quite capable and quite usable.
• ACD acdsee* Photo organization software with editing capabilities. Lots of professionals make use of this software.

Slide Show Creation Software

What about friends and family without a computer? You can make prints of your digital images (see above). Also, you can create slide shows to share with anyone who has a DVD player.

If you have a DVD burner on your PC, you can create slide shows that can be viewed on most any DVD player or computer. There are a large number of programs available to help you create slide shows. Using programs like these, you can share your slide shows, annotated with your comments and music of your choice, with family and friends. We list a few of many available packages here:

• Photodex ProShow Gold* Easy to use and complete. Create DVD slide shows, computer slide shows and screen savers. Publish your slide shows to the web. Hundreds of options for transitions, panning effects, and captioning -- or take the defaults and create basic shows in minutes.
• Ulead CD and DVD PictureShow*
• Arcsoft DVD Slideshow*

Scanning Resources and References

• The Pixmonix Scanning Overview Page. We believe that our introductory material is a great first step to understanding the scanning process and making good choices when you have your slides or negatives scanned. Please check it out! (Please let us know what you think.)
• Wayne Fulton's Scan Tips* An excellent introduction to all things scanning, at a moderately technical level. Good discussions on the actual process of scanning and post processing of scanned images. The links page* has pointers to lots of additional resources. This site is a great technical introduction if you are interested in doing scanning yourself.
• The Cornell University Library* has a nice set of web pages on digital preservation that includes some introductory material on scanning. This is focused on document scanning and preservation, but most of the material applies to scanning and preservation of digital images. (These pages are also available in Spanish and French.)

Monitor Calibration and Color Management

You are quite particular. You want the color of the digital image on your monitor to match the colors of prints from your printer or from a digital photo printing service. They don't. Quite likely, the problem is not your eyes but rather the adjustment of your computer and monitor. Generally speaking, images on your monitor will not look exactly like printed images even if your system is adjusted perfectly. The dynamic ranges of monitors and prints differ considerably. You can make it pretty close, however.

You can purchase hardware and software packages to automatically (or semi-automatically) calibrate your CRT or LCD monitor, printer, and scanner. You can spend a little or a lot on these solutions -- and most people do not need to do this work. The links below take you to a few of the prominent manufactures of these solutions.

• Monaco Systems*
• ColorVision*

• This FAQ, at the International Color Consortium, gives lots of information on color profiles and color management. http://www.color.org/faqs.pdf*
• A highly detailed and technical discussion of color mangement issues can be found in this book, which is available most everywhere digital photography books are sold (e.g., see Amazon's listing here*):
  • Fraser, Murphy and Bunting, Real World Color Management, Peachpit Press, 2003

Archival Storage of Slides and Negatives

Now that your slides or negatives have been scanned to digital images, you can box up the originals and store them in a safe place. A safe storage location is one that is dry, dark and protected from temperature extremes. Listed below are a number of suppliers of archival-quality storage materials for slides and negatives. We encourage you to spend a few more dollars to properly protect your slides and negatives.

The lifetimes of various storage media (CDs and DVDs) has been examined by manufacturers, government agencies and many others.

• MAM-A* (formerly Mitsui) A manufacturer of high quality CDs and DVDs with very long lifetimes. CD lifetimes are reported to be apporoximately 300 years and DVD lifetimes of approximately 75 years. This company has just announced a new archival DVD with a 300 year expected lifetime. When it is widely available we will use this DVD.
• The National Institute of Standards and Technology* has done a series of studies on the archival properties of DVDs and CDs. The latest study can be found here*. This study indicates that the type of archival quality CDs and DVDs that we use (those using the Phthalocyanine dye and gold reflective layers) have the best longevity properties.