The pictures that you submit should be consistent with the stated purpose of the site: to display pictures showing Livermore kids of the past with their friends, classmates, neighbors, teammates, and other associates. The pictures should be old enough that the kids appearing in them are now adults. Pictures may be scanned from original photographs, yearbooks, or newspaper clippings. The original pictures should be clear enough and the resolution sharp enough so that the people in them can be identified.
You can scan your pictures and submit them by email or by regular mail on a CD. You can also send the original pictures to me and I will scan them for you and send them back. (But please write to me for mailing instuctions before sending me pictures.) I have just acquired a new scanner (an Epson Perfection 2450) and I am eager to put it to work. If you are not especially expert in scanning and/or do not have access to a good scanner, I encourage you to send your pictures to me for scanning. I can also scan slides and negatives. Beginning this summer, I may be able to make periodic trips to Livermore to scan pictures for anyone that can bring them to me at my parents' house on College Avenue. You may also make copies (not photocopies) of your original pictures and send me the copies. But copies made on the self-sevice machines that are available now in many places are generally not as sharp as the originals, and so I would prefer to have scans of the original pictures if possible.If you choose to scan your pictures yourself, they must be scanned at a minimum resolution of 150 dpi, with no sharpening or other editing, and saved in TIFF format.
Here are detailed instructions:
- Please place the picture on the scanner glass as straight as you can before scanning, so that I do not have to use graphics software to straighten the image later. I can use my graphics software to rotate the image 90 degrees, if necessary, but I do not like to rotate the image by smaller increments because that tends to distort the image.
- Scan each picture at a scanning resolution of 150 (or greater) dots per inch (dpi) so that the image displays on the screen at about 200% (or more) of actual size. If you will be sending the scan as an e-mail attachment, 150 dpi is probably as high a resolution as you will want to scan the picture, because a higher resolution will produce a file that is too big for most e-mail systems. But if you will be burning the file into a CD to send by regular mail, then I would prefer that you scan at 300 dpi or greater, since file size should not be a problem on the CD.
- Please do not allow your scanner to use sharpening or other automatic adjustments. And if your scanner allows you to set the black and white points that will be used for the scan, please do not set them too close to ends of the histogram. And please do not use graphics software to adjust the brightness, contrast, or sharpness of the scanned image. (If adjustments are necessary, I will do that later with Adobe Photoshop). If your scanner is capable of producing raw (unadjusted) 16 bit grayscale or 48 bit (16 bits per channel) color ouput in TIFF format, and you will be burning the files into a CD, please submit them in that mode, if possible, so that I have the greatest flexibility to adjust the colors and level of contrast in the image. (I am presently using Adobe Photoshop 6.0 to edit images for this site.)
- Save the scanned image in TIFF format (with extension .tif). Do not use LZW compression. You can compress TIFF files using WinZip or PKZip if you need to reduce the file size.
- Please send a description along with the picture, describing the picture as specifically as you can (for example, "Miss Kim's second grade class, Joe Michell School, 1966--1967") and identify as many people in the picture as you can. I would also like to know the format and dimensions of the original picture (for example, "black and white, 6 x 9 inches") and the name of the photographer if you happen to know it. If the scan is from a published source (for example, a newspaper or yearbook) please identity the source. If you choose to send this information in electronic form, please use a text-only format (not a proprietary word processing format like WordPerfect).
- You can send the scans and accompanying information to me in one of the following ways:
- Send it as an e-mail attachment to webmaster@livermoreclasspics.org with information about the picture in the body of the e-mail message. As far as I know, there is no ceiling on my mailbox and I have received image files as large as 5 mb in the past.
- Burn it into a CD and send the CD by regular mail. Please write to me for a mailing address.