Hello everyone and thanks again for your precious replies. I'm sorry for the delay in the answer, but this is a very busy period of time for me. However, I think I managed to achieve some good results that I'm sharing with you all. I would love to receive some honest feedback and criticism to enhance even more what I have done.
Based on the great ideas you have given me, first of all I rotated correctly and cropped the scanned potographs for a neat composition effect. This was difficult sometimes, as some of the edges became badly trimmed, so, with a lot of patience and trial and error, I used the CLONE tool and the HEAL tool to "rebuild", little by little, the void edges of the pictures. Yes, if you zoom in 800% you can definitely notice some strange things happening here and there, but that's not the case for a 100% or even 200% zoom.
Then, I applied Colors -> Levels: the only adjustments I made is that I set the black and white INPUT levels based on what I could see on the Histogram (always around 30 - 240 and, depending on the type of picture, I set the greys (mid points) around 1,20 - 0,90. I left the output levels to standard 0 - 255.
Then I applied Filters -> Enhance -> Noise Reduction, noticing good results with Force around 6-8.
Then Filters -> Enhance -> Unsharp Mask, Radius 3,4, Amount 0,5, Threshold 0,0.
Is there anything you would suggest me to add, more? Is there a "safe setting" regarding black and white input/output levels, considering these edited pictures are going to be printed ona photographic book? Thank you very much.
Please note that these are 500% closeups crops from the original big images.
Based on the great ideas you have given me, first of all I rotated correctly and cropped the scanned potographs for a neat composition effect. This was difficult sometimes, as some of the edges became badly trimmed, so, with a lot of patience and trial and error, I used the CLONE tool and the HEAL tool to "rebuild", little by little, the void edges of the pictures. Yes, if you zoom in 800% you can definitely notice some strange things happening here and there, but that's not the case for a 100% or even 200% zoom.
Then, I applied Colors -> Levels: the only adjustments I made is that I set the black and white INPUT levels based on what I could see on the Histogram (always around 30 - 240 and, depending on the type of picture, I set the greys (mid points) around 1,20 - 0,90. I left the output levels to standard 0 - 255.
Then I applied Filters -> Enhance -> Noise Reduction, noticing good results with Force around 6-8.
Then Filters -> Enhance -> Unsharp Mask, Radius 3,4, Amount 0,5, Threshold 0,0.
Is there anything you would suggest me to add, more? Is there a "safe setting" regarding black and white input/output levels, considering these edited pictures are going to be printed ona photographic book? Thank you very much.
Please note that these are 500% closeups crops from the original big images.