Journal Facsimiles Update

So, I sent a photocopy of the original to Joan and Don Joy in Conway, South Carolina, so Joan could finish reading it, while I work on the rebinding of the original and the production of the facsimiles.

Today I picked up a proof copy of the facsimiles on ordinary paper, done for Bessenberg by a service bureau in Saline. The result isn't very good -- the problem is, the original is fine-point blue ball-point pen on somewhat faded paper. Turn that into a straight one-bit-per-pixel image using thresholding, and you've got a gritty-looking image with dropouts; bring the threshold up too high to make it darker, and the background starts to get speckled.

Bessenberg sends out their scanning and printing to a service bureau, so the binding is now on hold while I work with the service bureau to come up with something that looks better. They're probably accustomed to scanning dissertations in crisp black print on a white background, which doesn't require a high bit depth. I think what I'll have to do is ask them to scan it again, in color at perhaps 600 dpi, and give me a disc with the images. I'll then have to spend some time playing around with the images in Photoshop, which may mean finding the best per-page settings, then bring it down to a dithered black and white image, and have them print that.

So, on the one hand it looks like I will have to put more time into it, where I was hoping to pay other people to do all that. But on the other hand, the results should be closer to what I want -- and if it works out right, I'll also have an archival digital version, which is actually more than I had originally hoped for.

Bessenberg Bindery

With Grace's help, I've finally gotten my act together enough to take Marcella's journal to Bessenberg bindery, to have it bound in a new cover, along with a box. The original cover is disintegrating, but fortunately the paper in the book is holding up well, and it is sewn, and can thus be put in a new cover without too much difficulty.

I'm also having five bound archival-quality facsimile copies made, and an unbound facsimile to be kept in a box. This should make it easier to scan or make further copies in the future. I'm also hunting for someone to finish transcribing the whole thing, after realizing that I'm not going to have time to type it all; and even if I did, my wrists just aren't up to that much typing. I'm on the computer pretty much all day at work as it is, and don't want to give myself an attack of tendonitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.

And finally, I have a photocopy (on ordinary photocopy paper, made at a Staples), which I'm sending back to Joan and Don so that they can finish reading it.

When the original is done, I'll send that to Joan and Don as well. The facsimiles are for the grandchildren. They estimated they would be done in about three weeks.

I'm not making a lot of headway in my scanning and archiving -- it's a lot of work! And when Joshua arrived, our free time was squeezed just that little bit further, and a lot of our planned activities fell apart. But I will keep plugging away as best as I can.

The Blue Album

Before our family vacation, I was able to take apart and scan the pages from a large-format photo album that I'll just call the "Blue Album." This album was easy to disassemble because it was held together with a string. The full pages were too large to fit on the scanner, but I took digital photos of each page to help preserve the layout, and then took a high-resolution scan of each photo, and a lower-resolution scan of each caption.

The photographs in the Blue Album are in mixed condition -- some of the black-and-white portraits are absolutely mint, but many of the color snapshots are fading badly. The pages are fibrous, acidic black construction paper, as was commonly used. It sheds little black fibers everywhere, so despite my best efforts at cleaning the scanner glass and dusting the pages between scans there are little black fibers on some of the images. I will need to do some extra cleanup with Photoshop in some cases. Some individual pictures have torn spots where glue has stuck to the prints, but most of them are in decent enough shape. I considered various preservation options up to possibly soaking the prints off the pages, but in the end just reassembled the album and put it in a sturdy drop-front box from Archival Methods. I made several gold DVD+R backups of the images. I will eventually get these sent off to Linda.

Anyway, we took the train to Gaithersburg, Maryland, and I took the album in its big black box with me. I presented the reassembled "Blue Album" to the family. Linda and David got a chance to look at it, and Joan and Don took it back to Myrtle Beach, along with Marcella Armstrong's journal. I have not yet finished reading and transcribing the journal yet, so I am hoping to borrow it back at some point, and perhaps to get it bound in a new cover while I'm at it.

Meanwhile, I have also done a first round of cleanup and enhancement on the images from the blue album. I am trying to come up with a more efficient workflow -- uploading images individually to Blogger tends to be very slow and unreliable. Aperture can export a web album, so I'm trying that. I've taken my picks for the best photos from the Blue Album and put them into a web album. On this G5 iMac, Aperture takes a very long time to generate the web album -- in fact, it has been at it for a couple of hours, but the time estimate keeps going up, not down. When it is done, I will upload this web gallery separately to my Dreamhost space and provide a link here.

While assembling the gallery, I realized that I apparently missed scanning the images from one of the album pages. These are three black-and-white portraits of Linda. The page they are attached to was badly torn, so I probably was having trouble getting the photos onto the scanner without tearing the page apart completely. I must have set it aside to scan later and then reassembled the book without getting to them. Fortunately, I do have the low-resolution digital photo of that particular album page, although it shows some distortion due to the angle. I may also have other copies of one or more of these prints elsewhere in the collection. If not, I'll have to see if I can eventually get these three portraits scanned.

One last thing -- while there are numerous pictures of me in this album, including some I don't think exist elsewhere in the collection, there are unfortunately none of my brother Brian. Apparently this album was assembled before pictures of Brian were available. This doesn't mean there aren't lots of pictures of Brian! I have many, many more in the collection, and will get to them as I work my way through the project.

Album Pages and Exposing Captions

I have a stack of loose pages on that old black construction paper. Here is what one of them looks like:


The caption, written in white ink on the black paper, is quite difficult to read, but it says "Miss Rice at Camp" and "Music Instructor." And this is one of the more legible captions. Some of them are nearly impossible to read.

In some cases, the pictures are already nearly falling off the black paper, but bits of the paper are securely stuck to the photo. After scanning the photo, I pulled it off the paper, which brought some of the black paper with it. I decided to take a chance and try soaking off the black paper residue.

In fact, it comes off very easily. The picture dried nicely with no apparent damage. Now I can see what the back of the picture says!


Miss Rice, Music Instructor at Camp Chedwel, Summer of 1917.

There is a side benefit: getting these pictures off the black paper removes them from a source of leaching acids, so they may actually survive longer this way. The photo shows no sign of damage to the emulsion side and actually seems cleaner for having been washed for a few minutes. It did, however, gain a couple of visible water spots. That means I have to figure out a better way to dry it. I'm going to try a nylon mesh drying rack. Should I be using some kind of squeegee? Maybe, but these prints are kind of fragile, so maybe I will just try to make do with paper towels. Do they make acid-free paper towels? Maybe I am losing my mind...

I may try this technique with the rest of this batch of loose, disintegrating album pages. That way I'll have a high-resolution digital image, a scan of any annotations on the album pages, and a scan of any hidden annotations on the backs of the original photos.

Cleaning Slides and Making Prints

I'm cleaning and re-scanning slides. The slides are of all different types. The wedding pictures are Ektachrome, and seem to have aged quite well, although some of them have mildew spots. I wiped them with a "tiger cloth" (anti-static micro-fiber cloth) and PEC-12 emulsion cleaner; this did nothing for the mildew spots, but did remove some dust and dirt. It seems impossible to get everything off the slides, so some of it inevitably gets scanned. Digital ICE works on the Ektachrome slides, and removes some of the dust spots, but does not work on the Kodachrome slides.

I've also been experimenting with post-processing to improve the color, and making 300 dpi versions of the images for printing on my inkjet. The results are pretty good, now that I'm using Adobe RGB and a monitor profile for proofing. Some of these will be going out as Christmas gifts. Color pictures look pretty good on my old HP Business Inkjet 1100, although it does a poor job rendering blacks. I'm eventually hoping to replace it with an Epson R2400, which uses three different black inks for excellent rendering of black and white images.

The slides also really need to go into better storage boxes, which I'll eventually order from Archival methods.

Archival Supplies Ordered

To start getting these pictures into their long-term homes, I ordered an initial round of storage supplies from Archival Methods. These include tissue paper, a big 11x17 box for some of the oversize prints, a smaller box for 3.5x5-inch prints, 500 print sleeves, a number of open-ended paper envelopes, and index divider cards. While this certainly won't hold everything, it is a start. I think I'll probably be placing a monthly order for at least the next few months.

I also ordered 50 gold DVD+R discs. They are relatively expensive, four or five times the price of Taiyo-Yuden DVD+Rs as sold under the Verbatim brand. Because the gold reflective layer does not oxidize like aluminum, marketing materials claim that they can last 100 years or longer. Some gold CD formats even claim 300-year longevity. That seems unlikely, and even if they survive for 100 years, consider: how many 100-year-old media formats can you use today? How many 25-year-old media formats?

Still, my hope is that they will last long enough for a member of another generation to explore. If that person is smart, perhaps they will copy the files onto some undetermined future format and create their own distributed backup for yet another generation.

Busy Week for Paul, Slow Week for the Blog

I have not managed to post much of anything to the blog this week -- between home life and work life I've been pretty busy. I will get some new scans completed this weekend, as well as some re-scans. Right now I have about 3 DVD+R discs' worth of completed, final scans that I'm satisified with, in high resolution. Some of these files are very large (200 MiB or more). I think the largest is around 400 MiB, which requires a pretty capable machine to open or edit.

I'm scanning them with a variety of settings, depending on the nature of the print. Black and white prints with decent contrast are generally getting scanned at 600 dots per inch, but some that are extremely sharp are getting scanned at 1200 dots per inch. All of the very oldest are getting the 1200 dots per inch treatment even if they are large. A small handful of prints are getting scanned at 2400 dots per inch. Three of these are tiny contact prints that are of the same size as the original negative, so I can recover a lot of detail if I scan it at a resolution closer to what one would normally use for a negative.

The relatively modern black and white prints with good contrast are getting scanned as 16-bit grayscale images. But the older prints, in sepia or cyanotype and often very faded or stained, I'm scanning as 48-bit color images, even though they aren't really full-color images. That sounds wasteful, but I've discovered that for many of the faded or stained prints, a cleaner image can be obtained by picking and choosing what RGB data is mixed down to gray. Sometimes stains are a particular color that differs from the photo tint itself, so using three color channels give me a better shot at removing the stains. Basically, this gives me more options to work with for later attempts at image restoration.

Image restoration plug-ins and tools seem to be a growth industry right now so I'm imagining that in a few years there will be tools that can do things with the high-resolution, high-color images I can't even think of yet.

These are the sets of files that I want to start shipping out to family members on gold DVD+R discs, together with index prints, as off-site backups of the Armstrong Collection. Gold DVD+R discs are a bit pricey so I have not purchased them yet, although I have made test backups of each group on conventional DVD+R discs.

These big files are the "master" scans that feed into Aperture. Most of them are just as they were saved by the scanning program, although I have rotated and cropped some of them, or stitched together multiple scans (in the case of prints that were too big to be scanned in one pass). There is no contrast or color correction, no de-skewing, and no touch-up for dirt removal, except what I could achieve by cleaning the prints. That means these aren't the best images for actually looking through the collection. For that, I'll need to distribute galleries of lower-resolution enhanced images.

Samples Coming

Angela at Archival Methods responded to my request and is going to send me a catalog as well as samples of their various envelopes!

We'll see if Light Impressions responds to my sample request as well.

Making Sense of the Prints

So I've learned a few things about sorting prints -- often times, their backs, not their fronts, hold the clue to dating and placing them.

I've got several hundred prints with nearly identical corrugated edges, printed to nearly identical gray tones. But what isn't identical is a stamp on the back that seems to be a stamp used by the printer. It isn't just the number that is unique, but the ink, color, and even the placement of the numbers on the back of the prints. It then becomes a jigsaw puzzle.


Even photos that have been cropped, glued down into an album, and torn out of an album, some kept in the dark and sum exposed to the sun -- if there is a fraction of that stamp there (in one case, even a tiny speck of the purple ink in the same approximate position), I know it belongs to a particular batch for printing. And then if even one of the prints in the same batch is dated, or has a place reference, I have some additional clues as to where it came from.

This is a significant help because this helps me make sense of prints that come from something on the order of _sixty_ similar-looking batches. A neat trick! And so large swaths of the collection start to fall into place.

This is my work surface for sorting these prints.


I could easily make good use of five or ten times this much space!

Archival Storage Materials

Figuring out what to do with all of these thousands of photos is hard!

Some of them can go into albums -- suitably archival albums -- but if I fill up the albums with the second-rate or third-rate photos, no one will want to look at the albums. And at somewhere upwards of 10,000 photos, that's a lot of albums. A lot of shelf space. A lot of money!

So, the plan is to put most of the prints into storage boxes. But not to clip them together with paper clips or wrap rubber bands around the bundles, stuff them into mailing envelopes and cram them into shoe boxes. They should go into sleeves or envelopes that are appropriately acid-free and which won't damage the prints, and which will also support them and keep them flat, and then into solid boxes.

There are various companies out there that will sell sleeves, envelopes, etc. of all different types; side-loading, top-loading, with flaps and without, of polypropylene or polyester, frosted, clear, with stiffening cards or without... a dizzying number of options. I was going through the online catalog for a company called Archival Methods picking out products I'd like to try, but the minimum purchase seemed to be either 50 or a 100 of each sleeve or envelope. I realized I was going to spend over $150 just to try out a variety of items, most of which I would probably not use. So I wrote them a note and requested one each of a variety of sleeves and envelopes to try out.

We'll see what they say! I will write to Light Impressions too and request the same kind of thing (they have similar products, but some that don't overlap). And maybe I'll be able to settle on a storage method and start getting these things packed up!

Lots of Books and Cleaning Supplies

Last night I received two packages: one from Light Impressions, containing some cleaning tools and supplies. Light Impressions seems like a great resource and their catalog of archival supplies is very comprehensive, but I can't say I'm very impressed with their prices. Their prices on storage boxes and papers, sleeves, and envelopes seem reasonable, but these various items seem extremely expensive. I feel like I've been ripped off. They also charged me $20 for shipping and handling, but yet it took over a week to get the materials. I'm keeping an eye out for a source for the same materials that is a little more competitive on service and price. I'd love to actually support a local store if I could find one that stocked the boxes, sleeves, and albums that Light Impressions carries.

Anyway, I received two cleaning brushes, an anti-static cloth for cleaning transparencies, PEC cleaning fluid and non-abrasive tissues, a pH-testing pen, a slab of pH-neutral rubber eraser for cleaning prints, and a tin of wax which can supposedly be used to clean and protect prints. I'm a bit uncertain about all this stuff, but if some of it can help me get a cleaner scan and preserve the materials a little bit, I'll go ahead and give it a shot.

I also received the books on scanning and digital darkroom techniques from Amazon.

I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed! There is a great book about digital restoration of damaged and faded photos but it is a massive tome that goes into extreme detail with hundreds of examples. The author Ctein has a huge arsenal of techniques he has used for dealing with all different kinds of problems.

I was planning at this stage to just make as good a scan as possible of the original and deal with the image files later. That is still a reasonable plan, but it turns out there are a lot of issues involved in just getting a good scan to work with.

For example, some of the prints develop a "sheen" which I think comes from silver migrating to the surface of the emulsion. They look almost like they are printed on foil. The scanner can have a difficult time with these because the surface is very reflective.

There is an arsenal of techniques for getting better scans. Among them is scanning black and white prints in color, instead of grayscale, on the grounds that one of the channels will inevitably get better information than the others.

One of the interesting techniques Ctein recommends for solving some particular problems is not to use a flatbed scanner at all, but to set up a copy stand and take a high-resolution digital photograph of the original. Then the issue becomes all about just how you light it -- with polarized light at certain angles, etc. Complicated!

Then, if I'm going to make prints myself, it brings up the whole topic of color management. Doing that well requires a really good monitor, with a hood. Room lighting has to be color-neutral. You need a colorimeter to calibrate it. You need a proofing light to inspect prints. At the moment, I've barely got a square foot of usable desk space!

So I have to think carefully about what is "good enough" -- what will give the best preservation for a reasonable cost. I think spending money on the input devices -- the scanner and maybe a better digital camera -- is definitely a no-brainer, since that determines what all the other steps have to work with. Maybe I should let go of the idea of making high-quality prints at home, at least for now. Maybe a reasonable solution would be to make a homemade hood for the iMac monitor and calibrate it and then plan to do printing via a service bureau and hope for the best.

At this point I should mention that I would gladly accept contributions from family members who might like to assist with the organizing, scanning, preserving, restoration, and distribution effort!

An Album in Progress

My mother was apparently assembling an album out of loose photographs. By "loose" I mean some that seem to have never been stuck into albums, and some that seem to have been torn out of black paper albums. The black paper albums are not archival -- in fact, they are acidic, so removing the photos should be considered a good thing, except that they were glued in and removing them left a mess.

The new album -- one of the "magnetic" kinds with sticky pages -- is not safe for long-term storage of photographs. The adhesive on the pages is nasty on the photos, and the paper is acidic. The pages are visibly yellowing already. So, for preservation purposes, they have to come out.


Fortunately, most of them were loose. A handful of them had been attached with (cringe) scotch tape to the album. There was nothing to do for those but tear off the tape as cleanly as I could, which was not all that cleanly.

So, we have in some cases prints which had notes written on the back, which were then glued to black paper, then torn off the black paper. Sometimes additional notes were written on the back, or somethings on the front. A variety of different inks were used, but most often ball-point pen ink, which is destructive and eats through photographic paper. Then some of those had scotch tape attached. It also looks like in many cases the prints were cut, by hand with scissors, sometimes unevenly, to fit album pages. Even some instant prints (the kind filled with chemicals) were cut. In some cases the cutting wound up indiscriminately cutting off or cutting in half some of the explanatory text written on the back of the prints. I can only grit my teeth and sigh. The end result is that some of the notes on the back are now completely illegible.

Family photos have a hard life!


I have not decided where they are all going to wind up -- they will go back into the sorting process with the rest of the loose photos and then get scanned. They would have survived better in a loose pile in a shoe box than in these multiple albums. I don't want them in a pile, though, because the leftover black paper and glue and ink and tape residue on the backs will be in contact with the fronts of their neighbors. So they should go into albums again, or into boxes. I think we can do it a little better this time, but they will not last forever no matter what I do.

In case my mom's ordering winds up being important to date or otherwise contextualize the pictures, for reference I took a series of 1-megapixel pictures of the pages as they were laid out in the album. Then, while I was at it, I took a 1-megapixel picture of each picture. The album went in the trash. The pictures are going to get sorted with the others, and scanned. and then put into what I hope will be a better home.

Memory for Memories

I ordered a 2 gigabyte memory upgrade for the G5 from Crucial, so that I can run the 30-day trial of Aperture. I am hoping that Aperture might do what I need as far as organizing these photos, especially when it comes to keeping track of metadata. I think that is part of what it is designed for. My only hesitation is that I want the metadata to be part of the archive. If it is locked in some proprietary format, and in ten years no one has ever heard of Aperture, there goes the metadata.

I've seen a lot of people complaining that Aperture is slow, but I think this may come primarily from two factors:

- When you import pictures, it builds thumbnails using an I/O- and CPU-intensive background task, which can slow down your computer for many hours.

- It is no doubt a very memory-intensive applications, and if it runs out of physical RAM and starts paging, things are going to feel very sluggish, very quickly.

We'll see how it goes in practice!

The Scanner and a Big Cuppa Mocha

How I spent Sunday.



I completed about 130 scans of prints at 600 dpi, 24-bit color. 48-bit color was a possibility, but I'm not sure there would be any visible benefit even when targeting enlarged prints. The scanning itself goes fairly quickly, but the real work comes from trying to figure out how best to organize the originals and the files.

Working on Batch 1

I'm starting with Group 1, Batch 1. Group 1 is a set of 19 3.5-inch square prints from around 1971. I'm not sure if I'll use the same settings for everything, but this group I scanned at 600 dpi using 24-bit color. The master images are stored with no cleanup or color correction.

In order to create some lower-resolution images for web use, I then imported them into iPhoto and created a gallery using a few of iPhoto's enhancements (straightening, cropping, color enhancement). This does not change the original files.

I'm quickly realizing that the photos as they arrived are even more jumbled up than I thought. I don't want to try scanning slides yet, so those will leave batch 1. The school portraits exist in dozens of duplicates so I shouldn't scan those now either. And as I peer through the other boxes I'm finding a lot of photos that belong in these groups -- many of them are part of the same set of prints, for example, the Kodak instant photos.

I had originally planned to just scan everything sequentially, to sequentially numbered files, mostly ignoring any kind of grouping of the originals. But that leads to very inefficient scanning, since I can't tile the prints nicely on the scanner if they are all different shapes and sizes. It also does nothing to relieve the original organization problem. As I got into this I quickly realized that I want the original prints to be much more organized when I'm done, if only to group them up for putting them into archival boxes to send to relatives.

This means I can't really call a group complete until I've gone through every print and grouped them as best I can. If I scan as I go, rather than scanning after they are all sorted, this means that I'll be constantly adding images to groups and the file numbers will have not relationship to the groups any more. Which means it then becomes quite a chore to match up the originals to file numbers, especially since I don't want to actually write the file numbers on the originals.

Madness awaits!