Roger Cox - July 2009
For detailed photo enhancement to be successful, the initial copy needs to be in the lossless "tif" format rather than the compressed "jpg" format. To enhance the pictures and eliminate the sepia cast, I use a digital photo program - I have Adobe Photoshop and Serif Photoplus each of which have certain features that sometimes gives one program an advantage over
the other, depending on the correction that one wishes to make. Image adjustment in these programs includes a black and white film option, that converts the sepia image into the conventional black and white appearance. This can then be manipulated to improve contrast and brightness, and correct some other aberrations. Photoshop and Photoplus (and other similar
programs) allow extra pixels to be interpolated when the image is
enlarged. There are several resampling options which do this, but the usual one is called Lanczos. However, I prefer to use a program called BenVista PhotoZoom Pro, which gives eleven different options for enlargement, rather than the three or four offered by the photo enhancement programs. I then choose the one that gives the best balance of detail and sharpness for the picture being enhanced. For the historic panoramic school photos, I find that Mitchell or Catmull-Rom usually gives
the best results. Having saved the corrected image in "tif" format, it is then straightforward to produce a reduced "jpg" version.

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