Hi Jacqulyn,

You might have a look at The GIMP, which does almost everything
photoshop does and is free.

There is an Illustrators team at DP that always needs help. I hope that
you, and perhaps some of the folks you are in contact with, will join
and give us a hand with our illustrations. I hope that eventually DP
will have a parallel process that will have experts preparing
illustrations while the text is being proofed and formatted.

Whether for DP or otherwise, there are several common steps in prepping
illustrations for a PG book. First, the originals have to be scanned.
Getting good scans of illustrations takes practice and not all of our
volunteer content providers are good at it. But everyone does the best
they can and we encourage them all to scan illustrations at a decent
resolution and, in the case of DP, upload those scans to our server.
Another stage of the process is taking the raw scans and making them as
good as possible, while still leaving them large for archiving. I
usually do this before I upload to the DP server (stuff like deskewing,
making sure the colors match as best as possible, etc). But not all
volunteers have learned enough about graphics programs to do that part.
Then further, PG usually wants illustrations that will look good on a
screen, and to keep the overall file sizes down, so there is another
stage of processing that reduces the image as much as possible without
unacceptable loss of detail. There are definitely tricks to doing that
(which I don't know). Often folks will choose to make a smaller version
for display within the ebook and a larger one that can be obtained by
clicking on the picture. Also, what's considered "reasonable" for size
and detail depends to some extent on the book. A children's picture
book, or a book about art, can reasonably have larger illustrations than
something that was starting with not-so-good B&W photographs poorly printed.

We deal with everything from simple line art to steel-cut engravings
(very fine detail) to printed color illustrations (needing descreening)
to the xyz-gravure stuff that seems to scan beautifully (I don't know
what the process is for the various -gravure stuff but it doesn't seem
to result in the same kind of screen dots that one sees in most color or
B&W photo stuff), to beat-up decorative book covers. There are also
illustrations and maps that are too large to be scanned in one piece and
need to be put back together. Lots of challenges for people who like to
do restoration.

JulietS
DP Site Admin

Jacqulyn Perry wrote:

> My real interest is in working with the images. My problem is I'm not
> very computer literate-I'm an 'old fashion' painter-so I'm not sure
> how much I can do with the limited graphics programs I have.
>
> I'm pretty sure I can take care of the smudge, but it would require me
> using Paint to remove the smudge, then printing the image out and
> doing the retouch by hand-I used to work as a photo re-touch
> person-then scanning the re-touched image to send back to you. Which I
> would be glad to do.
>
> I've posted the image at an artist website I belong to, that has a
> VERY active computer graphics forum and asked their advice. I've also
> asked about a good graphics program. Though from what I've seen so
> far, most of the images you folks have, at the most just require a
> little brightening and maybe a tiny bite of color adjustment. That I
> CAN do with what I have. Anything I CAN'T do, I will say so.
>
> I'm sure that Adobe Photoshop would take care of anything at all I
> would need to do, but due to lack of cash, buying it is out of the
> question for now.
>
> Oh yes, I figured I would need to contact the person who originally
> did the book, and ask for a high res file of the images. I just wanted
> someone to see what a difference lightening them, makes.
>
> Leigh


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