just stumbled over your channel, browsing Epson V600 stuff of which I have one on order for. Tasked with much the same as you, digitalising the family archives which spans pictures from about 1890 to this day. I have been postponing the task for years and dabbed a bit with camera digitalising but with the hoard of paper copies, I have been somewhat overwhelmed. Found the Epson FF-680W last week and bought one of those, and it made short order of most of the paper copies in just a couple of days, at 600 DPI/tiff format choice and it also has a rather nifty inbuilt colour correction mode, making two copies of the original. It gobbles up a stack of less than 50 4x6" paper copies in at about seconds pr paper copy and i have set it up to produce two copies, one identical to the paper copy, and one copy which is autocorrected. Getting FF-680w was probably as close to a miracle as I will ever be. The V600 is to take the pre 1930s stuff which is largely cardboard mounted, slides, 120, and other odds and ends, as well as possibly other odd jobs in there. Your videos are a very nice take on the archiving bits, doing it good enough but not over the top and a rather refreshing take on the scanning side of photography!
@JensMHA Thanks for your comment and for making me aware of the Epson FF-680W. I just watched Keith Cooper's video about it, and what a fabulous little scanner if you have lots of prints. It's incredibly fast, and having the automatic feed is so much better. Doing this task on a regular flatbed scanner would take forever. I bought an Epson printer last year, and I'm now a big Epson fan. Their products are well thought out and well made. My task was to scan in negatives, so even if the FF-680W had been around previously, it would have been no use. Thanks again for the heads-up about this scanner, and good luck with your remaining scanning using the V600. It won't be quite as simple, and it will require more intervention, but positive slides, 35mm and 120 negatives won't be an issue. When my Dad died last year and I inherited the family photo archives to scab, it was basically the same kind of thing.
Hi Phil, thanks for the video. Whenever I open an image in Photoshop that has weird colors or exposure, the first thing I try is Image > Auto Color (or Command-Shift-B). It helps if there are no outside portions which would throw the assessment (bits of white or black around the edge of the frame from the scanner bed or similar). Most times this gives a good improvement in overall color balance and also brings the whites and blacks into decent shape if the image was under- or over-exposed, without blowing out the highlights. You can use the Fade (Shift-Command-F) feature and dial it back to 80% or something if it seems a bit too much. Sometimes with a very poor image (extremely faded prints where almost everything is orange-ish, highlights are gone and there's nothing close to black), it's hard to get back to anything realistic-looking. I also sometimes use Image > Adjustments > Shadows/Highlights to bring out a bit more detail in the darks or try to rescue some detail in blown-out light areas, though it defaults to giving you a very HDR-looking image, so you have to play with the settings for a more subtle effect.
Thanks for the tips! There's always a thousand ways to do the same thing with Photoshop. I'm not an expert and I will only ever be able to use a tiny fraction of Photoshop's capabilities. The method I described is just one way I found to quickly achieve fairly realistic colours from scans of old photos. I'll give your method a try next time I scan some old photos.
Hello. Thanks for your video. I have hundreds of old family photos to scan as well. I was wondering if you can scan many photos at once (perhaps 4?) And other than taking longer to scan why wouldn't you use the color restoration option on the scanner? I was thinking that's why I bought this scanner thinking that it would do the color restoration automatically as the photos were scanned. Thanks for any help.
Thanks for your comment! Yes, the scanner is big enough to accept A4 documents, so you could scan multiple prints at the same time. This would give you one file, which you could then crop and save as individual files in post-processing. I tried this and had a problem. The prints just lie on the glass without being held in place, and when you put down the scanner lid they have a tendency to move. If they overlap, you then have to do another scan. With a single print, you can wedge it in the top right corner and it doesn't move. By all means give it a go, but it didn't work very well for me. I found that most of my old prints had developed a strange color cast and I tried various methods to remove the cast. The color restoration settings in Epson Scan didn't work very well, although I have used these settings effectively with negatives. What worked best for me was the Neutralize option in Adobe Photoshop Image > Adjustments > Match Color. As a result of the Epson Scan color restoration not being very effective, I turned it off because the scans take longer with it on. The thing about scanning is that there is no single best way to scan in every image. Every image will be different, even different frames on the same roll of film can be different. It is necessary to do a lot of trial and error to see what gives you the best results. Happy scanning!
just stumbled over your channel, browsing Epson V600 stuff of which I have one on order for. Tasked with much the same as you, digitalising the family archives which spans pictures from about 1890 to this day. I have been postponing the task for years and dabbed a bit with camera digitalising but with the hoard of paper copies, I have been somewhat overwhelmed. Found the Epson FF-680W last week and bought one of those, and it made short order of most of the paper copies in just a couple of days, at 600 DPI/tiff format choice and it also has a rather nifty inbuilt colour correction mode, making two copies of the original. It gobbles up a stack of less than 50 4x6" paper copies in at about seconds pr paper copy and i have set it up to produce two copies, one identical to the paper copy, and one copy which is autocorrected. Getting FF-680w was probably as close to a miracle as I will ever be. The V600 is to take the pre 1930s stuff which is largely cardboard mounted, slides, 120, and other odds and ends, as well as possibly other odd jobs in there. Your videos are a very nice take on the archiving bits, doing it good enough but not over the top and a rather refreshing take on the scanning side of photography!
@JensMHA Thanks for your comment and for making me aware of the Epson FF-680W. I just watched Keith Cooper's video about it, and what a fabulous little scanner if you have lots of prints. It's incredibly fast, and having the automatic feed is so much better. Doing this task on a regular flatbed scanner would take forever. I bought an Epson printer last year, and I'm now a big Epson fan. Their products are well thought out and well made. My task was to scan in negatives, so even if the FF-680W had been around previously, it would have been no use. Thanks again for the heads-up about this scanner, and good luck with your remaining scanning using the V600. It won't be quite as simple, and it will require more intervention, but positive slides, 35mm and 120 negatives won't be an issue. When my Dad died last year and I inherited the family photo archives to scab, it was basically the same kind of thing.
Hi Phil, thanks for the video. Whenever I open an image in Photoshop that has weird colors or exposure, the first thing I try is Image > Auto Color (or Command-Shift-B). It helps if there are no outside portions which would throw the assessment (bits of white or black around the edge of the frame from the scanner bed or similar). Most times this gives a good improvement in overall color balance and also brings the whites and blacks into decent shape if the image was under- or over-exposed, without blowing out the highlights. You can use the Fade (Shift-Command-F) feature and dial it back to 80% or something if it seems a bit too much.
Sometimes with a very poor image (extremely faded prints where almost everything is orange-ish, highlights are gone and there's nothing close to black), it's hard to get back to anything realistic-looking. I also sometimes use Image > Adjustments > Shadows/Highlights to bring out a bit more detail in the darks or try to rescue some detail in blown-out light areas, though it defaults to giving you a very HDR-looking image, so you have to play with the settings for a more subtle effect.
Thanks for the tips! There's always a thousand ways to do the same thing with Photoshop. I'm not an expert and I will only ever be able to use a tiny fraction of Photoshop's capabilities. The method I described is just one way I found to quickly achieve fairly realistic colours from scans of old photos. I'll give your method a try next time I scan some old photos.
Hello. Thanks for your video. I have hundreds of old family photos to scan as well. I was wondering if you can scan many photos at once (perhaps 4?) And other than taking longer to scan why wouldn't you use the color restoration option on the scanner? I was thinking that's why I bought this scanner thinking that it would do the color restoration automatically as the photos were scanned. Thanks for any help.
Thanks for your comment!
Yes, the scanner is big enough to accept A4 documents, so you could scan multiple prints at the same time. This would give you one file, which you could then crop and save as individual files in post-processing.
I tried this and had a problem. The prints just lie on the glass without being held in place, and when you put down the scanner lid they have a tendency to move. If they overlap, you then have to do another scan. With a single print, you can wedge it in the top right corner and it doesn't move. By all means give it a go, but it didn't work very well for me.
I found that most of my old prints had developed a strange color cast and I tried various methods to remove the cast. The color restoration settings in Epson Scan didn't work very well, although I have used these settings effectively with negatives.
What worked best for me was the Neutralize option in Adobe Photoshop Image > Adjustments > Match Color. As a result of the Epson Scan color restoration not being very effective, I turned it off because the scans take longer with it on.
The thing about scanning is that there is no single best way to scan in every image. Every image will be different, even different frames on the same roll of film can be different. It is necessary to do a lot of trial and error to see what gives you the best results.
Happy scanning!