It had long been a dream of our 1961 classmate, Mary Olivier Thurman, to put our three years of The Rebel Yell online, where they would be available to anyone with a computer and a connection to the Internet.

We have been asked what steps were required to get them online. Here’s a brief summary.

Scanning
     The Rebel Yells were scanned one page at a time (so far over 150 pages) on a large-bed scanner at a UPS store. The charge per page (normally $1.50) was reduced to $1.00, since we had so many pages. Many law offices would have large-bed scanners, as they have to scan legal size documents. Sometimes large-bed scanners are referred to as “A3” scanners, since they can accommodate the A3 European size of paper (11.7" x 16.5").
     The Rebel Yells in the late 1950s and early 1960s were 12” x 18”, with usually at least a 1” margin around all four sides. The A3 setting on a scanner proved better than the 11” x 17” setting.
     The papers were placed on the scanner so that the left margin was larger that the right margin and aligned so that nothing was cut off the top and bottom. The papers were scanned in color at 300 dpi. The images were saved individually as TIF files.

Adjustments
     The pictures in The Rebel Yell were originally “screened” as part of the printing process, meaning they were made up of a series of dots. These pictures, if not adjusted, will show up on a computer screen with moiré patterns. To eliminate this problem, such images must be descreened, using scanning software designed for this, or be blurred after scanning. A by-product of both processes is a blurring of the text. Given the large size of the newspaper pages, the computer files are large; larger files take longer to download for viewing. The aim of the adjustments was therefore to find a compromise that ensured the best quality of the pictures, minimized the blurring of the text, and maintained a reasonable file size.
     To accomplish this, each and every page was individually adjusted using PhotoShop Elements.
          1. Each image was rotated to a vertical orientation and straightened as needed (Image, Rotate, Custom).
          2. A Gaussian blur of 0.7 - 1.0 pixels was applied to each page (Filter, Blur, Gaussian blur). If there were no photographs on a page, the blur was usually not applied.
          3. The color was removed from each page (Enhance, Adjust Color, Remove Color).
          4. The contrast and brightness was adjusted, depending on the quality of the pictures. Increasing the contrast also sharpened the text (Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Brightness/Contrast). The contrast was increased from +40 - +50; brightness was adjusted from 0 - +10.)
          5. To sharpen the text, each image was sharpened as needed (Filter, Sharpen, Sharpen).
          6. Each image was cleaned up of smudges, spots, etc. using the Eraser Tool.
          7. The images were resaved as TIF files with no compression.

Preparation for the Web
     Each image was cropped (Image, Crop) to be approximately the same width (±3504 pixels). With the exception of the senior edition, each issue of the paper was 4-6 pages. All of the pages of each issue were combined into one PDF file using Nitro PDF Professional. (Any PDF creator program would work.) The files were saved at a “medium” quality to keep the file sizes reasonable (9 - 15 MB). The senior issues are much larger. (Sharper PDF files could have been placed on the web, but they would be approximately three times larger and take three times as long to download.) The files were uploaded to the Web using Ipswitch’s WS_FTP home version. There is no charge for the Rootsweb web space.

If anyone would like to have the original TIF files to give it a go for themselves, I can make them available on the web for downloading.

If there are any questions about any phase of this process, feel free to contact me.

Norm Hellmers
norm.hellmers @ gmail.com