Well, for $129 you get Panther, which by most accounts, will make your G4/466 feel spunkier (nice word) and Font Book. So my recommendation would be for Panther. Of course you should do a little research and make sure the stuff you use (apps and peripherals) will still work. Not being a big font guy, though, I’m not sure what you need in terms of organization.
Joe
Caveat: I’m not font meister (although I do love my Adobe Minion & Myriad fonts and my Bitstream Kunstler, Monospace821, and Iowan Old Style fonts).
Panther does have font management, but from what I’ve read, it’s not super sophisticated. It’s great for average users, but not really enough for power users. Other than that, I can’t tell you what to use since I’ve never used any font management programs.
Yes, I haven’t used it much myself, but font book does not seem to be making anyone who’s used to pro-level font management very happy right now.
breegenie, I’d suggest doing some reading on the apple forums before deciding–there are some disadvantages to all the different font utilities. You need to figure out which you can most easily live with.
Breegenie,
I’m happy to see someone else with a Microtek 6800 scanner and even better its with a MAC also. I just set mine up. It seemed to do well with a creased image of my great-grandmother. Any tips, ideas, experiences with it and its interaction with PE would be welcome. Do you know of a scanner forum where this scanner is covered?
Many thanks
Carl
Carl-
I don’t know if any forum, but the 6800 has done a great job with a wide variety of scan jobs I’ve thrown at it — mostly 1960s & 1970s faded Kodak prints, 1980s darkening Poloroids, lately. I haven’t started on the early 1900s because the 1960s-1980s photos will be damaged beyond repair sooner. You can store a scratched or ripped print, but I don’t think even PE2 can save a photo once it has faded into a blob!
As far as using it with PE2, this is my system. I tend to mass scan for a few hours at a time, as it is really a boring, time consuming task. When my G4 is behaving, I rip CDs into iTunes, too. OS X’s pre-emptive multi-tasking is great!
I haven’t played with the Digital Ice feature yet, as it was only recently made available for OSX. I plan to use it when I start on the older photos that have seen more handling.
What I do now:
I use the advanced screen of the Scanmaker driver (click on the icon in the upper right of the simple screen). I do a prescan, set DPI, output size, etc in the palettes on the left. Then I scan to TIFF, with the new file defaulting to open in PE2. I then use the PE2 straighten and crop command to fix any issues. I then save that as the "original."
I tend to do photo fixing when I have more energy/time, which isn’t as often as I’d like. So I open the original, do a save as immediately and then start doing any fixes. Fixing the fading or darkening is usually just a matter of playing with saturation and hue until I’m happy (this does require having a good colorsync profile). Occasionally I need to fix red-eye. Eventually, I’ll crop them into more aesthetically pleasing shots, but I’m holding off on that until I decide their final use.
What I am struggling with is organizing all these photos! I need to spend more time understanding how to get scanned photos into iPhoto. iPhoto plays nice with my cheap 1megapixel digicam just fine, but that is as far as I’ve gotten.
Hi, Breegenie,
Getting your scanned photos into iPhoto is easy. Any one of these methods will work:
* Drag & drop.
* Create a new Album, and drag & drop into it
* File–>Import
Breegenie,
I’m not at home to test this, but I think you should be able to have OS X’s Image Capture automatically open the scanned image in iPhoto. If I remember correctly, open Image Capture’s Preferences, and there should be a pull-down menu that has options for setting iPhoto to open the image after it’s scanned.
As far as organizing your scans, if you figure out a good way let me in on it. 😉
Joe
Lou-
I’ve tried all of the above with two updates of iPhoto and it doesn’t work with my scans. I downloaded the newest update last night and I’ll install it this weekend. Maybe it will finally work for me.
Joe-
Image Capture doesn’t recognize my scanner, for some reason. I could set it in the scanner driver’s defaults, but I really need to straighten the images in PE2, first. Now if I could set it up so a photo heads there AFTER I straighten or crop, that would be great!
In terms of organizing the family pictures, I’m utilizing a few things.
For naming, I’m using the initials of the people pictured, the year & month(if I know it or an approximate year if I don’t) and a number if there are multiples. This way I can do a search on people or chronology.
Examples:
JRB JMB 0212 1 = Mom & Jeanne Christmas 2002 pic 1
RJB JMB 0303 = Richard & Jeanne @ Jeanne’s Birthday in March 2003
For additional searching, I’m putting keywords in the comments section of Get Info, like Thanksgiving, birthday, camping, etc. If I can get iPhoto working, I’ll use the keywords there, too.
FWIW, I leave all my photo names exactly as they received from the camera. I then organize them in iPhoto by month–I create a new album for each month with the year and month (200309, 200310, 200311, etc). Then I assign keywords in iPhoto. This is all done just on the originals.
When I edit photos, I do everything outside of iPhoto, but I still organize them in folders based on month. I also leave the original filename as part of the new filename, so I can trace them back to the original photo. For example, IMG00234.JPG in iPhoto (unedited) might become IMG00234_JoeAndSamInColorado.psd or something.
It’s probably over-engineered, but it works for now. 🙂
The naming system I described is for scanned images. I don’t own a nice digicam, just a 1 megapixel that I use for eBay sales & documenting various things. When I do get one, I may have to rethink my naming conventions.
Believe it or not, I name scanned images starting with an (at least approximate) date, for example "1940s HelenSavage BrooklynHouse.psd". Of course, once I start getting more than a few dozen photos for each decade I’ll have to revisit this. 🙂
I’ve got so many different naming conventions going on that I’m just about to give up! I’ve been doing this scanning thing for quite some time and I have literally thousands of old family (1800’s-1980’s)scattered about my hard drive. I just wish I had a good way of naming/organizing. Right now my naming scheme is "birthname(until marrage) location/event approximate date". For example "Terri Henry, Xmas c1959". This works well for about five seconds (or until you scan in a few more decades worth of Christmas pictures/slides that include all of us kids).
I have the images organized into folders divided first into my mom’s side of the family and my dad’s side. Then I organize by decade and family. Of course there are plenty of images that have both sides of my family represented so there’s a whole nuther set of folders. As my Grandma used to say "Egads!"
Joe
