From several sources: Francis Ruud and Esther Ruud Stradling sent the majority of the images, selected from among those collected by Eloise McKay Ruud; Ila Ruud Rupley supplied several images that had been given her by Eloise Ruud or that she had copied from Eloise Ruud's originals. Lois Ruud Stinson supplied a particularly interesting original photograph of the ole ruud homestead, ca 1899, from which several images were derived by editing; also, a photograph of two young (probably swedish) women, in new york. A database of the images, "../0-Info-fei", is in the top directory of this image hierarchy and is described there. File names and identifiers used below correspond to this database. Eighty-four photographs or negatives were gang scanned or scanned individually by use of a Microtek ScanMaker i900. The device was calibrated with Kodak standards for reflective and transparent materials. Scanner output was 1600 ppi for photos (reflective) or 3200 ppi for negatives, and 8-bit gray scale or 8-bit color. By cropping during prescan, with scanner software, individual images of gang scans were exported to photoshop. If necessary, the image was first rotated (straightened) or cropped to clean up the edges. All images were adjusted for tone with autolevels. In some cases minimal other adjustments were made, which were encoded in the filename (see below) The images were saved as tiff files with LZW compression, in the directory, "./scans/". If the autolevels correction performed for each image was insufficient to produce a good image, additional tonal adjustments were made (levels, curves, shadows, variations), and in a few cases the image was cropped, e.g., to reduce sky or foregound. The most common problems were too black shadows or too white highlights, which hid details present in the image; these were brought out by tonal adjustment. Lastly each image was corrected for noise (dust and scratches, parameter set at 4 for 1600 ppi image) and sharpened (smart sharpen, parameter set at 8 for 1600 ppi image). A few images were repaired for damage (healing brush, etc); generally imperfections were not corrected. The adjustments made were encoded in the filename (see below). Elliptical images surrounded by background material (card stock, etc.) were treated specially: the elliptical region of the image was selected (elliptical marquee tool) and tonal adjustments made as above; the inverse of the elliptical region was selected and the background filled with neutral gray (127,127,127) or another solid color if the image itself had near neutral gray background; the image was cropped to the edges of the elliptical region. An identifier of the scan set (the date, 060220) and an ordinal were prepended to each image filename. The adjustments made in photoshop were appended, using the following codes: lev = levels; var = variations; shad = shadows; ds = noise, dust and scratches; ss = sharpen, smart sharpen; heal = healing brush; crop = crop; ellip = special treatment of elliptical images.1. The filenames are of the form: date - ordinal - short description of image - adjustment codes .tif e.g., 060220-70-sture-carlson-cousin-augusta-var-dsss.tif where "var-dsss" encodes the adjustments (in this example, "variations" for the image saved in "./scans", and subsequently "dust and scratches" plus "smart sharpen" for the image saved in "./splits-orig/"). Several filenames have embedded also identifiers for scanner output other than the default (1600 ppi and 8-bit gray scale): 3200-ppi 8-bit gray scale output for five negatives ("neg3200-8gray"); 1600-ppi and 24-bit color output for 2 tintypes, converted in photoshop to 8-bit gray scale ("24color-8gray"); 1600-ppi and 8-bit color scanner output for three color images ("8color"). The adjusted images, derived from "./scans/*.tif", are in the directory, "./splits-orig/". There are 87 adjusted images, three more than the number of scans, owing to derivation of several images from one scan (e.g., cropped and uncropped). Finally, the files "./scans/*.tif" and "./splits-orig/*.tif "were reduced in size. The scans at 1600 or 3200 ppi were at higher pixel density than warranted by the information in the parent images: except for a few exceptional images, 400-800 ppi appeared to be sufficient to retain information. The images were ranked by either file size or image area. Images with file size (LZW-compressed tiff) > ca 35 Mb / image area > 30 in-2 were resampled (bicubic) to 800 ppi; smaller images, to 1200 ppi. The files "./splits-orig/*.tif" were similarly reduced: to 800 ppi for file sizes > 30Mb / image area > 30 in-2, and to 1200 ppi for smaller files. The tiff format image files of directory "./splits-orig/" were converted to high-quality (8) jpg images, saved in "./splits-1-jpg/". The directory "./splits-jpg/" is symlinked to "./splits-1-jpg/". These and other directory names are as for previous scan sets. A web photo gallery, under "./photogallery/", was created as described in the top directory. 060307: Subsequently, two original photographs received from Lois Ruud Stinson on about 3/7/2006 were scanned to obtain images at 1200 ppi and 8-bit gray scale, and edited as described above. One image, that of the ole ruud homestead in 1899, was edited to optimally display three central regions of the photo, in order to better show family, hired hand, and house. These three regions are given as separate images, and as a composite image in which the optimized regions are overlaid on the parent image. The various tiff-format images are in the directories "./scans-060307" and "./splits-060307-orig". The tiff-format image files of directory "./splits-060307-orig/" were converted to high-quality (8) jpg images, merged into "./splits-1-jpg/".