A photographer's end of year checklist (5 things you shouldn't forget!)

We get excited about taking pictures and sharing them, sometimes to the extent we overlook some of the less exciting housekeeping tasks. BUT there are some things to do that make us better photographers in the long run and the end of the year is the perfect time to make sure we are on top of it.

1.Be grateful

It is a great privilege to be able to take pictures. To have the resources and the time to take an interest in some aspect of life and preserve it through a camera. I look forward to every photo session. The portraits I make allow me to meet and learn about hundreds of people a year. I get to hear about their experiences and soak up some of their wisdom. Not every one gets to spend time with so may interesting people, and for this I am grateful.

Perhaps you get to spend time in nature, or solve the puzzles of arranging still lifes. Maybe you hang around classic cars, or find local news stories to document. Where have you taken your camera in the last 12 months?

2.Backups

All those digital files! Backing up is a standard practice to prevent a single hardware failure from wiping out your work, and its often overlooked because we have other things to do.

But please do it.

Not only backup, but you could use the opportunity to make sure your files are organized and keyworded.

3.Print Print Print!

Digital files are convenient, but they don’t exist. Not in the physical world. In 100 years time, they could be lost to hardware failure, format obsolescence or worse - people wont be able to access them becaue they don’t know your passwords. Even if they did, would they be able to (or be bothered to) process RAW files? And even if they did would they want to sift through thousands of images to find the good ones. And even if they did, would they find the processed ones?

And so on.

This is all solved by printing your work. Every year I print 4x6s of family photos and store them in a shoebox for my children to find like my parents did.

I also go through my portraits and pick the 30 or 40 best ones of the year and print a low-cost Shutterfly book. I can show the book to clients and friends, and its also an archive of my best work.

4.Review

What did you take pictures of this year? How many pictures did you take? Did any pictures get published in a local magazine? What was your most viewed blog post or instagram picture? I like to document the most important things I’ve done over the past 12 months, especially if it was unusual, like getting picked for the juried gallery at a charity auction, or meeting a cool photographer or business owner that I really connected with. Take stock of what you did and write it down. After a few years you’ll have a collection of these reports and you’ll see how far you’ve come!

5.Plan

When you review your best pictures to print out, you can start to think about what you can improve on. Do you need to look for inspiration in different places? Is there a technique than needs some attention? Its a great time to set goals for the following year knowing that if you succeed or fail, you’ll have to write it in next year’s review!

Don’t just think about it, do it!

My end of year checklist is really important to me and I don’t let it slip. I need to know where I’ve been, where I’m going and to make sure my work is preserved digitally and physically. I love being a photographer and still get excited about where it might take me. Each year is better than the last!

I’m Fil Nenna, a portrait photographer serving Boston’s North Shore who specializes in helping small businesses like yours get more customers through quality images for your website. 

Located in Marblehead I provide on-location services in Salem, Swampscott, Beverly, Danvers, Lynn, Boston and beyond. I can work in any space no matter the size or lighting conditions. 

Please get in touch at info@filnenna.com to find out how quick and convenient making awesome headshots can be!

How to restore damaged old photographs

Before I describe how I restore old photographs, I’d like to make two important points:

  1. Cherished photos are best printed out. Your hard drive or phone is a graveyard for memories, but a shoe-box of prints in the closet is like treasure.

  2. Take good pictures of the people around you. Take bad pictures. But take pictures. A bad photo of your friends and relatives is much better than no photo of them.

The scan

Scans are great for repairing and sharing, prints are great for archiving.

Scan on the best scanner you can access, but remember that the original photos can be re-scanned in the future on better hardware. Negatives, small or very large prints can be scanned using a digital camera on a copy stand rig. The camera method is much faster than a flatbed scanner and also has the advantage of using the maximum resolution regardless of the original print/negative size. Read more on this method in my blog post on reproductions.

Remove and dust from the negatives/prints with a blower. Its easier to remove duct now than to spend time cloning it out digitally later.

Give the files suitable names, but even better is to create metadata tags with the approximate image date, location and the names of the people in it. This will make searching for the image a breeze in the future - well worth the time investment.

The software

If you do not deal with digital photographs on a regular basis (end even for those who do) I cannot recommend any subscription software. The core tools you will need are a way to invert negative images to positive using curves or an “invert image” function if you have negatives (but if you only have prints this isn’t a must), clone or stamp tool, and a way to selectively change colours in the image, as opposed to altering colour globally on the entire image. Photoshop Elements, Affinity Photo (which is excellent), or even GIMP are perfectly fine. If you have access to Lightroom, this will also work and make batch editing of large numbers of photos easier.

The crop

Always place the prints in exactly the same position for every scan, that way you can crop them all in one batch action at the end, if desired. You can crop the image to its exact frame, crop into the image for a better composition, or just outside of the image to ensure all data is preserved. Remember that a lot of software will permanently crop a JPEG or a TIFF (destructive editing) so be careful with your decisions. Better still, make a copy of images you will creatively crop into for composition purposes. Using layers in PhotoShop or Affinity is non-destructive so you can worry less.

The crop can also include rotating the image to remove unintentional tilts of horizontal and vertical lines (e.g. leveling horizons). An advanced method is to use a transform or perspective correction tool to straighten a photo. As much as I love doing this with my new images, I’m careful to kill the character of an old image with excessive adjustments.

Basic edits

Brightness and contrast should be your first port of call to get the image ready for restoration. You want to see as much detail in the shadows and highlights as possible without clipping the blacks and whites. A lot of these decisions are to taste, but excessive or clipped dark or bright areas need to be avoided.

Pixilation can be an issue with old scans. The example picture of my parents above was scanned more than 15 years ago on a low-end scanner. Its hard to mitigate, but you can use a small amount of blur or denoise to soften the pixel edges. I often make a mask so that eyes and mouths remain sharp, whereas large flat blocks of color get more treatment. You want to avoid a plasticky over-smoothed look.

Colours

A colour calibrated monitor is a nice-to-have for colour work, but you can get pretty far without one. Remember that most monitors are designed to have a blue-tint to fools us in to thinking it is brighter than it its. If you correct colours by eye on a blue monitor, your images will print in a more orange tone than you expected.

A first step is to find a part of the image that is supposed to be neutral (a white table cloth, grey suit, black shoes) and click it with a “White Balance” color picker. This will remove the colour cast from the entire image. Try picking multiple places to see which give the most pleasing result.

Global colour adjustments are tricky because old images fade in different ways. In color negatives, even new film has a purple tint in the shadows. If you corrected for this globally then the highlights will go green, so it needs to be handled delicately. Either split toning can be used (add green to purple shadows and purple to green highlights) or detailed work using a Hue-Saturation-Lightness (HSL) adjustment on an adjustment layer.

Faded parts of the image can be selectively saturated. Red skin can be selectively unsaturated.

Dust/scratches

Restoration work has the same goal as image retouching - to remove distractions. With restorations, the aim is not necessarily to improve the image, rather to get it back to its original level of quality.

Most dust spots can be removed with a healing tool. Use a new layer, call it “healing” and make sure it is set to sample the layers below it. Larger patches of scratches or other damage may require use of the stamp cloning tool to copy pixels from a similar, but intact, part of the image to the damaged part.

Final touches

The image already looks closer to life than the original did, no longer having color casts or distracting damage. You can add some sharpening, but careful not to re-ignite any pixilation.

Export the file as common JPEG or TIFFs, at a reasonable quality. When you’ve spent a lot of time restoring an image, you might want to save a native file for the software you are using so the layers are preserved and can be re-adjusted in the future.

And print your photos.

Contact me if you’d like help restoring or printing your old photos in the Houston area.

Artist reproductions: How to scan, prep and print your fine art

This is a broad overview of the scanning and printing process for artists working on flat surfaces (though 3d art or sculpture could be captured in a similar way). If you have questions or would like more detail on a certain section, always feel free to comment below, or contact me directly.

When you buy through affiliate links on the blog post, we may earn an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you.

Scanning

camera scan of artwork in Houston Texas

Flat-bed scanners are a low-cost way of digitizing your artwork, but you’ll find that it will only work for relatively small pieces. A more flexible solution is to use a digital camera on either a copy-stand, or a tripod configured to mount the camera below where the legs meet. This will suffice for pieces up to 16 or 20 inches across, but you can also mount larger work on a wall or table stand and take the pictures perpendicular to it. Another option is to take many overlapping images of your work and stitching them together in software. The epic resolution is amazing if you can cope with the epic file size.

I find a hot-shoe mounted spirit level is very useful to make sure the camera is perpendicular to the work, though you can also use a mirror - if you can see back down your camera lens in the mirror, the camera is in the correct orientation.

You can use any lens you have, but a macro lens has the benefit of having a flatter plane of focus that is just what you need for copy work. Don’t forget to use lens corrections in your editing software. This will counter any pinch or barrel distortions your lens might render.

Tethering the camera to the computer makes like so much easier. And if you have a series of works to scan, you can do it in a batch using guides on the live-view so that you can crop them in one action when editing. Capture One is well known for it’s tethering prowess, but I find the tether software your camera manufacturer provides is generally pretty good. I use the EOS utility for my Canon camera and was surprised by how good it was. Very underrated.

Graycard Greycard and Spyder monitor color colour calibration

A grey card is a valuable tool for setting a good exposure and for setting the correct white-balance in editing software. Use a low ISO like 100 for the least digital noise, a middle-aperture like f8 to get the best sharpness from your lens, and then pick the shutter speed that centers the exposure needle. Low shutter speeds are fine because your camera is not hand-held and your subject isn’t moving.

Shoot RAW for the most flexibility, but if you are confident with your exposures and white-balance, shooting JPEG will save a lot of time and require simpler software.

Better still is to use a color-calibration tool like the Spyder Checkr. This matches a calibrated color-swatch to the pixel readouts on your computer monitor for the most accurate color reproduction of your work. It will save a lot of printer ink compared to a trial and error method.

Light sources can be tricky so remember these concepts:

  1. The farther away the light-source the more even it will light your work. A well lit-room usually works, but setting up continuous or strobe lighting gives you more control.

  2. The larger the light-source relative to the work the more gradational the transition from highlight to shadow.

  3. Like in billiards, the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. Have the light angled so it doesn’t reflect straight back into the camera. A 45 degree angle to the camera is a great place to start.

  4. For even light, use a light source both left and right of the work, the same distance and power setting.

  5. If you want a more textured result, lower the lights so the light skims across the surface of the work, and play with altering the relative power of just one of the two lights. The relative orientation of the relief in your piece and the lights will make a big difference.

If the work is behind glass, remove the glass from the frame to prevent unnecessary glare or reflections. If you are competent with vector-graphic software like Affinity Design or Adobe Illustrator, you can mock-up a mat or a frame so that you can create a digital final-product image rather than mount all your work by hand. See the images in my Print Store as an example.

Processing

A good print starts with an accurate representation of your scan on your computer screen. You can calibrate your monitor for accurate color using a tool such as these from Datacolor and Calibrite.

A good global edit usually means setting your brightness slider so that the histogram is centered. Then set the black and white points so that are almost, but not quite, clipping. Of course, if you have a very dark, or very bright piece of work, your histogram should reflect that. Most software have lens-correction and perspective-correction tools to make sure the angular relationships in the final image honor that of the original piece.

Crop the image to the edge of the artwork, or to a desired aspect ratio for printing. If you are matting the prints, you’ll have to use a standard aspect ratio to fit store-bought matts or you can make custom mats to best honor your art.

You can use local editing tools like a spot healer to remove any dust or a gradient tool to remove any uneven light. I’d avoid removing imperfections of the artwork itself as you want to avoid misrepresenting your work to your buyer.

Printing

Artwork prints on a canon pixma pro 10

Two options here. Cheap and cheerful, or pricy and archival. Be clear with your buyer about which they are receiving. Cheerful means you can use a dye-based printer (vibrant, but will fade relatively fast) and low-cost photo paper which may yellow with time. Archival means using pigment-based inks and acid-free paper. These prints are the best we have at present, and the technology hasn’t existed long enough to know if they will last as long as the old darkroom prints.

Owning a printer is a lot of work you might not be expecting. They need to run constantly to avoid costly clogs, and some use a good amount of ink just for cleaning cycles. The ink ranks among the most expensive fluids in the world, and you need to use your manufacturer’s ink. Third party ink may seem like a bargain, but they will fade faster than OEM and will be less color accurate. You can’t do that to your buyer. Also, the 13x19” and 16x20” printers you are likely to choose take up a lot of space and are heavy.

But printing at home has some advantages - you can experiment, print on demand and sign your work before shipping. These things are harder to do with a drop-shipping service.

A simple way to cut a mat for a frame (and how to bottom-weight the mat)

Cutting a custom mat for your photographs or artwork is simple and requires only a few specialized tools. I recommend a good mat cutter such as a Logan 2000,  and a compatible straight edge which can be used as a guide for the mat cutter (see recommendations at the bottom of this post). Last, you need some scrap mat board for support underneath the mat you wish to cut, and a healing cutting mat to protect your table surface. 

Before you begin to cut your mat, you need to figure out the size of the window that will hold the print.  I like to have the window a quarter of an inch smaller than the paper sides along each side. So with an 8 by 10 piece of paper I would cut a window 7 1/2 by 9 1/2 inches to leave a quarter of an inch overlap so the print does not fall through the window. Sometimes I like to print my image smaller than the window so there is a quarter of an inch gap between the image and the mat (in which case I would print the image 7 by 9 in). 

Work on the back of the mat. 

1. Starting at the top left of your mat you can mark out the window width across the top of the mat. The remaining width represents both the left and right borders. So to figure out only the right border, divide this remainder by two and draw a vertical line with your pencil at that position. 

2. We can do the same for the bottom border by marking the window height from the top left and then dividing the remaining highlight by two. Draw a horizontal line at this point.

3. Now that the right and bottom boarders are marked, we can use the intersection of a lines as of the bottom-right origin from which we can mark out the window height and the window width. Mark out the final lines for left and top borders.

4. The window is now ready to be cut out with the mat cutter. The image is perfectly centered in the mat.

The problem is that a centrally placed image looks poorly balanced to the viewer. This is an optical illusion. It looks more balanced if the image is placed a little higher than center. When an image has a thicker bottom border than at the top, we call it a” bottom weighted” mat. 

5. A simple way to increase the bottom of border in proportion to the size of the image and the size of the mat is to draw a line from the window height mark on the left hand of the mat  to the original bottom border line intersects the right hand of the mat.  

6. The bottom-right origin point for the window is now where this diagonal line intersects the vertical line. 

7. The bottom weighted mat is more visually satisfying and looks distinctly better than any mats you’d find in a commercial frame.

This construction technique is useful for the first mat you cut for a given mat and window size. You now have the border measurements for any subsequent identical mats you need to cut.