General Craft & DIY discussion

Scrap booking, album photo documentation and event documentation.

How long do various kinds of photos, ink, & toner last?

I occasionally fiddle with our family tree & was recently thinking I should scan some of our old photos. Some are starting to crack after 30 years while I have others that are twice that old & fine. If I printed them out with a color laser at work would that be better than getting them done at Walgreen's or something?

Did you know you can scan old black and white negatives, reverse the colors and recreate great reproductions? When my grandmother died I said, "Just gimme the negatives", and now I have all the old family photos!

If you just have bad photos, scan at a decent resolution, then touch them up....

I assume of course you have a Paint program and know how to use it. I use Paint Shop Pro, version 3, 5, 8 and 9. Similar to Photoshop, just always was less expensive (though just as complex)

Color negetives aren't so easy to do... involving real complex math functions in a good paint program, but it is possible!

I familiar with, although not much good with Paint Shop Pro & others beyond the simplest things. I think I have v4 on my computer & cursed that for being too complicated when it came out. I use a free utility called Irfanview for viewing, converting, & annotating.

I have boxes full of pictures, slides, & negatives (some scanned) & that's part of the problem. In a scrap book, the photos are easily titled or annotated. In a box or directory, there often isn't any explanation. Memories go bad, people die & no one knows anything about them, so I thought if I scanned & printed them out with some explanations, it would help. At least I'd have them in front of me & be able to tell who I have & such.

I really enjoyed when I first "retired" and finally had the weeks available to sort through assorted boxes, files and drawers to correlate and put together the first seven binder "scrapbooks" covering the first fifty years. Part of the challenge was figuring out what happened WHEN and who the heck were these people?

Don't feel bad, I had the simplest version of PSP before I even had a computer that could run the program and didn't understand much at all. Once I got my present computer I obtained all the other versions, as 5 and below does measured drawings easier like when I designed my house, and the later versions can work miracles with photos and animations.

Such programs take many hours to learn, and there's still many features I haven't used because I figured out how to do just what I needed to do. Again, we're back to the fact that they are putting out "newer and better" programs before a person can even figure out the full capabilities of the earlier versions.

I have a book for PSP 6, and even though I don't have that version everything applies. For complex tasks like dealing with color negatives I searched online, found Photoshop directions and adapted.

I've never really had the need, knowledge, nor the patience to get too fancy with PSP & its ilk. There's an excellent freeware version in GIMP, in case you're ever interested.

My uncle left me with a box (1' cube) full of slides. Most don't even have a date on them. Pictures are from all over the world & cover 60 years, some were apparently my grandfather's. I never had time to go through them with him, so most are impossible to figure out. It would have been great to be able to print them out quickly, leaf through & make notes on them with him.

One concern I have with computer programs that do everything for you, is that if the electricity ever goes off people won't even be able to find their way home without their gps....

I have a real issue with programs that do too much for photos, like keep them in albums. They tend to last a few years & then not work or cost a bundle, so I keep electronic photos in simple .jpg files & put a text document in with them or make a copy of the photo & annotate them directly. That can take longer than printing them out & writing on them, though. Of course, anything that's a hassle tends to get put off & that means I generally forget about it completely. Then when I do have the time, I can't remember...

It's not easy keeping up with photos, no matter what format they're in.

By printing 8.5 x 11 hard copys of the good photos (stored by month taken) yearly (think 3 to seven photos per page), formatting them and captioning them with my photo software (PSP 8,9)and then adding them to the monthly section of the scrapbook I manage to keep up and have a permanent non electric record! (I do backup .jpg files twice a year, so if the computer crashes losses are minimal)

Photo "album" programs are very limited! With "print layout tools" in PSP you can arrange, resize and create great graphic designs with photos. Once printed out you have permanent, easy to access photos with no additonal cost.

One of the easier functions of PSP... just open all the photos you want on the page and start the layout!

PS 9 lets you caption each photo, but I just add a single line across the bottom of the page describing all the photos.

It easy to keep up with photos, what isn't easy is catching up if you get behind!

Speaking of scrapboks...

Been whittling away at my 2012 addition to the scrapbook. Yesterday I completed the narratives, basically the story in words for every couple months from letters plus journal notes, and today I did the glueing of things like reciepts, business cards, assorted documents, and egads, even a couple of the bilions of political adverts I got in the mail!

With receipts (other than groceries or recurring utility bills) pasted and trimmed artistically I can detail what my focus has been, like in September when there were dozens of reciepts for the big constuction projects.

Now all the pasted pages are sitting in a book press drying. No, not the old screw type book press in the shop, a pile a books with the pages in between!

Alls thats left is laying out and printing the photo pages then slapping it all in the binder and I'll be able to clear my head of another years memories!

Cool!

Have you tried Microsoft Publisher? I used it to make a book for my unit when we re-deployed from Iraq back to Germany. You can combine images and text elements, layout is pretty easy - only took me a few hours of fiddling with it to figure out what I needed to do to make the book look good.

I recently was shown another method for digitizing slides, too. Use a digital camera and a slide holder. Make sure the image fills your viewfinder, and then, snap away. Takes a fraction of the time than it does when using a scanner and doing one at a time. The slide should be back-lit to optimize color saturation.

If you're talking to me about Publisher, I've used & support it. I'm an IT guy. I wouldn't recommend doing much in Publisher beyond small stuff. It can do some very weird things, including suddenly blowing up in file size & corrupting its files.

I'll try that method for digitizing slides at some point. That sounds perfect.

This morning I finished adding the photo pages and slapping it all in document protectors thus creating the first half of volume twelve of my "memories".

Whew.. now I can empty my head and start fresh!

I never heard of, and probably wouldn't even consider a "publishing" program. I grew up cutting and pasting newspaper layouts... with scissors and rubber cement! To me thats the most fun part of the scrapbook, combining all the paper ephemera of life into visually interesting graphics that tell a story. It is nice to so easily augment it with readable narrative and inexpensive photos that tell the story more effectively than the first eight volumes that have pasted photos and ephemera but no narrative.

Over the next twelve months I'll add whatever paper comes my way to monthly file folders, keep writing letters and journal entries, as well as taking digital photos stored in "month" folders and do it all again next year.

But for now, another Winter project off the list!

Mathew wrote: "Have you tried Microsoft Publisher? I used it to make a book for my unit when we re-deployed from Iraq back to Germany. You can combine images and text elements, layout is pretty easy - only took..."

This is probably not very helpful, but PhotoShop is the elite of the picture editors. And I guess nowadays it goes for around $800. But back in Windows3.1 days I bought a flat bed scanner that came with a full-blown PhotoShop3. At some point I paid $100? to upgrade to PhotoShop5 (still 16 bit technology). This app continued to work under XP, until recently. Now I have to re-install it daily, or whatever day I need to use it, because Microsoft has damaged XP, in their usual clumsy way, making their Windows updates. I KNOW that PS5 will not work in Vista or Windows7. But if you do ever get a chance to own a current Photoshop, grab it! Fairly steep learning curve but it does stuff you'll never find on the el cheapo photo editors. I am NOT an artist but I appreciate the power of this app.

I got two Photoshop programs with my Leica V-Lux4. One is picture editing & one is for video editing. The bad news is, I'm not sure I even know how to open a file with them. They're completely wasted on me. I really should sit down & learn, but I work on computers all day for work & that sort of thing takes some real time.

Jim wrote: "I got two Photoshop programs with my Leica V-Lux4. One is picture editing & one is for video editing. The bad news is, I'm not sure I even know how to open a file with them. They're completely w..."

After reading your accounts of your activities for the past year I'm not surprised you don't have time to fiddle around guessing how PS works. But I did and do, and I suspect it was simpler in the PS3 days. These apps always seem to get bloated and unnecessarily complicated as they age.

Yes, they are bloated & my computers at home aren't the latest, to say the least. I do wish I'd learned earlier on. Now there are so many bells & whistles that it's tough to figure out where to start.

I agree completely Earl! That's why my paint software is all ten years old... and even then I don't know all the tricks!

I dread the day when this computer dies and a "newer faster better" machine will be unable to run my wonderful old software...

I have Adobe Photoshop Elements 10.0 & Adobe Premier Elements 10.0, FWIW. I think the first works on photos, the second on videos. Both take over a minute to open on my 5 year old PC.

Hey Jim, by the time you upgade you'll need newer photoshop programs that will Still take over a minute to open!

The way Microsoft & Adobe are going, it might take several minutes! My new servers are way faster & have a lot more memory than my old ones, but opening programs in Server 2003 is often a lot faster than in 2008. Exchange 2010 is a disaster compared to 2003. XP took up about 5gb on the disk. Win 7 64 bit took up 45gb on a laptop I just built. It's not a trend I appreciate, but have to live with.