2nd time around on Lightroom/Photoshop (etc) and historical research as well as hoarding......

[TonyBrookes]

I was just starting to begin to use Lr/Ps 8 years ago when life dictated that I didn't do anything on it till now. There are now 2 Lr's (!!) for me to play with on my personal photos, but I'm also researching into local history and need to process old maps and documents. The documents need making the text as visible as possible as the parchment has darkened over time/pencil faded. The maps need the same but sometimes a load of overlapping images need stitching together first so that I can have one large image for the mapping software to work with. That, I hope will change the raster image into a vector of the roads, track and field boundaries.

I've bought Victoria's books - anyone care to suggest a Ps one?

As to my personal images, well, the hoarding discussed elsewhere is me to a T - oh, and I need to get a backup regime that's sensible. Currently it's iCloud, OneDrive, a local NAS and daily time machine backups to the NAS and 2 usb drives. [I used to be a Information Security Officer for a University, so probably too risk averse on backups

Thanks

Tony

 

[johnbeardy]

I would not suggest any one PS book, and that's because of the variety of PS tasks is much more varied than the LR workflow. Most PS books are photography-oriented, but you're talking about restoration and pixel-editing tasks. So instead I would suggest concentrating on LR and seeing how much you can get out of LR. Its dust spotting tool might allow you to remove blemishes, or global or local adjustments like Clarity and Texture (maybe also Dehaze) might help as with the text problems.

But then it's going to be about knowing when you've gone beyond LR's corrections and really do need PS. For example, overlapping and stitching might be better in PS since LR's feature is intended for automatic matching of photos rather than old maps. While some PS books might help, the key will be to identify the specific Photoshop feature - for example layers to allow you to manually reposition two maps - and then go online to find out how they work. Anything by Adobe's Julieanne Kost is good.

 

[TonyBrookes]

Thank you - it's given me a place to start from/ All I need to do is change the existing setup (Lightroom CC as primary) to Lightroom classic as primary as per the book- Fortunately I've not put many inew images in via that route so deleting them from CC and recreating the edits in Classic is doable. Also I've found the bit (I think) where :R need to give way to Ps, that's using the dropper in Ps and replacing paint marks with black for legibility.
Still reading up and gently fiddling about.
Tony

 

[Conrad Chavez]

I've bought Victoria's books - anyone care to suggest a Ps one?

Because you’re working with historical images, you might want to look at Photoshop Restoration & Retouching by Katrin Eismann. It’s been a classic Photoshop reference for many years, although I haven’t seen the latest edition. It might be a better fit for your needs than the more general Photoshop books. She is a noted Photoshop educator who recently joined Adobe.

 

[johnbeardy]

I looked at my post again and was surprised I hadn't also suggested Eismann's book, as it would be more suitable, though it's not for complete beginners. I have the original edition and I don't know if the revision includes much of the newer content aware tools.