Online Photo help similiar to Videohelp.com?

[Huntn]

Can anyone reccommend a good online Photo help site along the lines of VideoHelp.com with forums?

My goal is scanning family photos and getting them on slide shows. Here is a scanner question I'd like to ask in a Photo forum:

I'm using a Microtek Scanmaker X12 USL scanner on a G5 Mac. And I'm using Vuescan software to drive it. I'm new to photo correcting using Photoshop. And I'm studying several books on PS, learning about curves and levels.

Some of the Vuescan documentation says that if you make a raw scan of a picture, you'll never have to scan it again. I also noticed that the raw scan is at 1200 dpi, and there seems to be alot of detail, although the resulting file is quite large, for a scan of a color slide, about 10 MB.

So I'm looking for opinions. Is a raw scan a good thing to have? Is it a good starting point for photo manipulation?

Thanks!
-Dave

[WiseWeasel]

The best scanners available are negative scanners, if you still have the negatives. This will preserve the most quality possible, and truly allow you to never have to scan again. They can be pretty pricey, but you can find photo places that will scan negatives for you; check your local yellow pages and make some calls. Once you have them digitized, you can adjust the color and whatnot in Photoshop, and save to any format you want. You can then use iDVD or Toast to turn those digital picture files into a slideshow on DVD for use in any DVD player.

[deadsierra]

These are slides you're talking about right? Then no negatives I believe (okay, I'm not that old, I have to rely on my ancient history lessons here :P)

Scan 'em in at as high detail as you can, and then you can decide what you want to do with them. Photoshop likes as much detail as you can give it, so it can give you a nicer image if you screw with it at a larger size and then scale it down. It's like working with video in that way. It's much preferable to work with pure DV footage than to work with MPEG (even if you convert the MPEG to DV first).

I'd go with the best scan you can, and remember, you can fit a lot of 10MB slides on a single data DVD-R, so archiving shouldn't be too much of an issue.

[Huntn]

Thanks guys!

I'm probably not going to invest in a negative scanner. And these are color slides I'm talking about. But eventually I'll be looking at color negatives too.

I assume when you make a "raw" scan, the scanner is not altering the data in any way.

No good photo help sites online?

-Dave