Rapaire -

I had a couple of rather large framed photos, 1890s vintage, badly warped and impossible to straighten, one with a 5 inch long (x 1/2 inch wide at one end) crack through the middle of it. Either of them would have been impossible to fit on my scanner (8.5 x 14 inch) even if they'd been flat enough to lay down, so I had to scan in pieces and then fit the hunks together.

The one with the rip took 8 separate scans (at about 245 MB each) to get the pieces, and of course "in-process" partial assemblies, and a few "startovers" ate up almost 5 GB, just for that one picture, while it was being worked. I was pretty conservative, and scanned all the pieces of the one with the rip at 1200 dpi, since I intended to print back at 13 x 19 inches (my printers maximum), and I figured it's better to have pixels to throw away rather than come up short. With the patching and pasting, I suspect 600 dpi would have been good enough, but I don't think I'd have gotten the results I did with anything less than 600. (For snapshots, I almost never use higher than 300 dpi in scanning, sometimes less.)

Saved as Photoshop's native .psd files, the few hundred photos I worked filled 48 CDs. The "reassembled" largest one was "only" about 218 MB (.psd) when I got done, and prints nicely enough at 8x10 from a 60 KB .jpg for the "distant relatives." (Only the close ones got the really good prints.)

Once the "fixin's" done, of course, you can always save in a smaller file format - I used a medium resolution .jpg to cut final file sizes to about 1/10 of the "working size." With the continual stream of "suggestions" from the family, though, I didn't dare throw out the original scans and quite a bit of the in-process stuff until I was sure everbody was satisfied (which may happen in a few years?????)

If you get Kelby's book, you'll want to take a good look at his "better methods" for exposure correction, color correction, his dodge and burn technique(s), and some of the stuff on straightening (and bending - to fit pieces together). There are automated fixes in PE2 for most of it, but his stuff really does work a lot better.

I've pulled usable, if not beautiful, images off of prints that showed no visible image by scanning the solid black print and using his screen layer overlays. (Flash failure at a street jam at 2 am at a festival. One street light 45 yards away.)

For restoration, the "clone tool" is magic. Any other method of wiping out large blemishes always changes the texture, and the "flat" correction will always show up in the print. You can usually clone an adjacent area that has the same texture on top of the blem and make them just disappear.

You'll have fun.

John