Digitizing an archive of film images can be a time-consuming process. Instead of opening hundreds of individual scans in Photoshop, things will go much faster if you use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw with Adobe Bridge. Their streamlined workflows and ability to edit TIFF and JPEG files can accelerate the process of importing, editing, and organizing incoming scans.

This article assumes that you have some experience using Lightroom 4 or Adobe Camera Raw 7. What you’ve learned editing digital camera images in these applications will help you with film scans too.

A lot of photographers ask me why their pictures don’t look sharp. Answering them can be complicated, because you affect image sharpness by many decisions you make at all stages of the process -- even before you take a photograph. And after you shoot a digital photo, image sharpness is affected by how you manage image contrast. The sharpening settings you apply in software are only the last link in that chain. So the focus of this article is about the steps up to that last link. Follow along and you'll create a solid foundation for sharp images.

Shoot for Sharpness

Adobe Illustrator gives you many of the same compositing features found in Photoshop, such as control over blending modes, opacity, and masking. While Photoshop is a better tool for editing at the pixel level, Illustrator is perfectly suitable for compositing vector and whole bitmap objects. Sharon Steuer (painter and author of many books, including The Illustrator WOW! series) chose to create a Valentine's Day card design in Illustrator because it's a mix of type, vector graphics with applied effects, and imported bitmap images (Figure 1).