greg_matthews2

<p>@Rodeo Joe, one of the post processing things I do is to balance Levels (or Curves) to get rid of the brown foxing of the pages which they have a tendency to do since cheap newspaper paper will brown with town. When I do that any hard lighting becomes very obvious since it creates a bright spot where ever the light is pointing. I meant to say SOFT box instead of LIGHT box. The soft boxes spreads the light out so there's not a harsh central point where it shines. The positioning of them is a matter of trial and error, but gives much better results over direct lighting. The photo I posted earlier was done with soft boxes however I didn't have them slaved to my camera to flash. The best lighting I've ever gotten was when I tried scanning them on a small desktop scanner, but as I mentioned in an earlier post that's time consuming and potentially destructive.</p>

<p>I've used Lens Correction in Photoshop and while it makes improvements I still have to tweak it. When you're doing portraits or macro photography or landscape photography or anything similar you can get by with Lens Correction from various software, but with these newspaper Sunday comics I'm dealing with straight lines on each page that are obviously distorted if they aren't dead on straight. The only thing I found that would produce perfect lines was the Nikon 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. Per the recommendations in the first few replies I've ordered the Nikon 55mm lens in the hopes that the sharpness of this lens and its superior optics lives up to the reputation.</p> <p>Here's an unprocessed image that has had lens correction to it. It's fixed all 4 corners except the bottom left which still needs to be adjusted. If you were to draw a marquee around the boxes you could also see some bowing in the middle of the image.<img src="https://i.imgsafe.org/7e0d8c0.jpg" alt="" width="816" height="1080" /></p>

<p>David, when I first started doing this that was the method I used, but that is far more time consuming than photographing. The upside is, as you say, perfectly flat images as well as no distortion and the best lighting possible. The downside is finding a place to put the scanner where I can easily move these delicate newspapers (some are from the 1890s) around on the scanner bed without tearing them, making sure I've got the proper overlap and then in the end I still have to take the time to line up the edges in Photoshop, cut off the overlap and even out the lighting on the edges. Photography just works out better for this. The only thing I can imagine that would work out better would be a scanner or copystand that could hold A0/A1 paper and those are in the range of $10,000+.</p>

<p>I was just looking at the price of the 55mm f/2.8. It's definitely in my price range!</p>

<p>Thanks, I had been reading that this 55mm was one of the sharpest, but I wanted other opinions.</p>

<p>One of my hobbies is collecting very old Sunday newspaper comics. I like to share these on the internet in high resolution. Since old newspaper pages are typically much too large for a scanner or copystand that I could easily afford I photograph them. My problem is that the lenses I have cause distortion (curvature) on the edges of the pages. I edit the pages in Photoshop to remove the foxing, orient the pages correctly and a few other things. The distortion can add several extra steps since I have to do Transforms on 2 to 3 corners normally to work out the curvature on the corners and lines of the boxes in which the comics appear.</p> <p>My camera is a Nikon D7100. I once rented Nikon's 105mm f/2.8G macro lens and it gave me fantastic results. There was no curved distortion at all. Since I wanted a macro lens, but didn't want to pay for the expensive Nikon lens I got the Tokina 100mm which gives great results with macro photography, but I get a little more distortion than I want with it when photographing these newspapers. It's better than my other lenses, but not quite perfect as I want it.</p> <p>One problem with the Tokina is that I have to have about 8 feet between the camera and the newspaper page due to the angle of view of the lens. This is somewhat problematic in that I don't really have a good spot in my house with enough room for the easel holding the page, lightboxes on either side and the camera 8 feet away. With the Nikon lens I have to be even further away.</p> <p>I bought Nikon's el cheapo 40mm "macro" for another purpose and tried using it, but I get distortion. My regular 200mm zoom lens is even worse (although not so bad if I move in relatively close and zoom out).</p> <p>I'd like to have only 4-5 feet between the camera and newspaper. Even closer would be fine.</p> <p>I guess I could spend up to $1000 on the lens if I absolutely had to, but I'd rather spend less if possible! Are there any good recommendations for me?</p>