Baca County History Reprint—Project Update

If you’ve ever turned a page and seen a face hidden behind scanner streaks, you know why this matters. As part of the reprint, we’ve been repairing photographs that didn’t survive the first round of digitizing—images with horizontal lines, blotchy blacks, and other scan glitches that obscured the very people this book is meant to remember. So far, we’ve corrected 191 photos.

What does “corrected” mean? In plain terms, we remove scanning artifacts while preserving the original look—film grain, halftone pattern, fabric texture, all of it. We are not revising the pictures or changing their tones; we’re fixing the scan of the original, so readers see what the original pages intended.

You can spot the difference in two examples from our scans. In one portrait of Zelma and Aaron Hale, faint horizontal bands ran across their faces and coats; those lines are gone, and the background wood-and-brick textures remain intact. In another, a studio photograph of Frank and Dora Neal had a scan glitch that blacked out one of Frank’s eyes behind his wire-rim glasses. We rescanned the images so that quality matches the original in the 1983 book—respectful and faithful to the source.

Most fixes fall into two buckets:

• Destriping & deblotching: Lifting the faint horizontal lines and random “blotches” introduced by the scanner.
• Micro-repairs: Mending other tiny glitches.

By the numbers (to date)

• Photos corrected: (191 so far)
• Typical issues were mostly on the even numbered pages and it impacted all kinds of photos: studio portraits, school snapshots, wedding/farm scenes, parade and band photos.  Hopefully, we can get most of these fixed. 
• Common issues: horizontal scan lines, stray blotches, scanner-amplified glare or shadow clipping
• We are through page 540 of 750

A community history is, at heart, a book of faces. When the scan gets out of the way, families can recognize loved ones, captions make sense, and the reprint reflects the book our community remembers—clear, dignified, and true to the original. Essentially people who want to can enjoy the reprint.  That’s all for now.