Wow! That's really good! I've used the basic tools of PSP before (crop, selection, etc.), and I'm very familiar with almost all the keyboard shortcuts (it's the reason I prefer PSP to Photoshop), but I've never done this type of restoration before.

I think if I have a lot of time, I'll try some of the restoration steps you've outlined, otherwise I'm going to try to get these pumped out as fast as I can. But I might look around for that software you used for sharpening.

You could scan them in and let Tony do them for you. Just keep pretending you don't know what he is talking about and ask for an example on a different pic. Repeat.

Does anyone know of a good free program that adjusts white balance in photos like these? I downloaded a trial of Paint Shop Pro X and I hate everything about the program. They removed a lot of the shortcuts that are ingrained in me, and still didn't add the Ctrl+W for closing images (it's just a pet peeve of mine).

Anyway, it's just a trial anyway, and I'm not going to pay whatever exorbitant amount of money that Corel wants for it. So does anyone know of a free program? I've found that just fixing the white balance/color balance helps these images a ton.

*edit*
Oh, and Tony, I'm not sure I understand, could you take a look at 290 or 295 photos for me? I'd appreciate it

Gimp or Irfanview ?

Picasa

It's free, it's blazingly fast, and the top secret feature is on the edit menu. It's called "copy all effects", which only works when you're in the mode where you see lots of pictures as opposed to any single picture. You then select all the similar images in your folder and hit "paste all effects". Boom. All the work you did to clean up the one photo now is done to everything.

Interesting, I've never tried Picasa's editing tools. I'll take a look at that. Thanks for the suggestion.

*edit*
Picasa does a really good job. Simply applying the "I'm Feeling Lucky" edit to all pictures instantly improves them. I've attached the one that Tony also worked on, and what Picasa did to it after I cropped it and it applied whatever it applied. It's not quite as good as Tony's (no sharpness and it's still not rotated perfectly), but it's pretty darn good. It's also a heck of a lot easier to do to nearly 300 photos

Hmm... if you go the picasa route, don't overwrite the original photos. Tony's version is far, far, far better. The picasa version has lost all kinds of details in the face that Tony did a pretty decent job of making visible.

Picasa leaves your original files entirely untouched. It instead tracks, in the metadata, the edits you've made. Every time you bring up a picture, it re-applies the metadata to regenerate the image (in much the same way as Apple's Aperture). That means, when you want to get your pictures out, you can't just go into the filesystem. Instead, you need to "export" them to a separate directory.

Yeah, that's exactly what I did. Trust me, I'm not the type of person who edits originals. For every step of every media project I work on (photo, audio, video, etc), I only work on copies. Most of the time I'll copy the entire project's folder and work on that.

In this case I have a folder for the original scans, one for the photos split up, one for the cropped photos, and one for the exports from Picasa after the edits.

And yeah, I realize Tony's job was really good, but it also took far longer than this method, which at least is an improvement on the original scan, and returns some of the color. It's not perfect, but it's better. So in case I didn't answer earlier: this project (at least, this early run of it) is not meant for restoration or prosterity. This is so my mom can view pictures from her youth on her computer or the big TV. If we ever want to really preserve these images, I'll either take the time to do it right, or we'll pay a bunch to have it done.

Thanks for your help, everyone! This will be a good Christmas present because of you guys Happy holidays!

Yeah, the Lumix I just got has a manual white balance feature that I use *all* the time. Haven't needed to drag a white card around with me, there always seems to be *something* white in the room I can balance against.