Advice from Marion

[Walt's Daughter]

Over the years I have received many wonderful contributions from people, including photographs from the war. After working with various documents and images, I'd like to offer some advice...

 

1. If you don't have a scanner and choose to make copies of old photos/documents with your digital camera, please remember to TURN-OFF the TIME-STAMP. There's nothing worse than WWII photographs with big red dates stamped across them. Also many times the stamp winds up right on top of text, making it very hard to read.

 

I can airbrush the date OUT, but many times the placement doesn't lend itself to this method. Plus it makes a lot more work for me.

 

2. When scanning images/documents, make sure to change the resolution/size to a higher setting. I often receive scans which are very difficult to read/view because of their small size. If you can't read it at 100 percent zoom, then neither can anyone else. The more detail, the better! For photos and other images, 600 DPI or above is great. Many thanks to Professor David Ulbrich for that suggestion.

 

I can easily down-size a scan, so don't worry about that, but it's difficult or impossible to get "more" out of an image, which was scanned at a very low resolution.

 

Thanks for listening.

[CaptO]

I absolutely DESPISE the date stamp!!! PEOPLE, IT'S a DIGITAL PICTURE!!! THE DATE INFORMATION IS IN THE PROPERTIES!!!!!!!!!!!! Back in the film days I could sort of see the reason, but I hated them then. "Oh look at the great picture of the kids and Grandma WITH THE BIG DAMN DATE STAMP IN THE LOWERE LEFT CORNER!!!!!!!!" AAAARRRRRRGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!

 

Anyway, I've been away for about a week but I'm back - and just in time to gripe about a pet peeve!! If you are wondering, Lightning struck two trees about 12 and 18 feet from my house. Blew out my smoke alarms, the NIC on my 7 year old desktop, and the phone/internet modem (which is fortunately the cable company's, not mine). It also blew the power supply on my desktop but it was my replacement 400W one so I just replaced the 250W and it works fine (with the aforementioned exception of the NIC.)

[Walt's Daughter]

Holy sheeze! Looks like your house was very, very attractive to mr lightning bug! Sorry to hear about that, but thank God it wasn't more serious, ie, fire, etc!!!!

 

Ya, I hate those date things too. As you stated, the date, etc., is all embedded into the pic. It simply ruins a lot of pics, and looks even worse on a WWII sepia-toned image.

 

I'm sure many aren't even aware they can turn these darned things off, so wanted to give them a heads-up.

 

NO DATE STAMPS!!! :wave2: