New Program wanted

Hi @Desmond3590442172ux,

There are some concerns in your post that should be looked at before you decide:

1. Software and tools

Photoshop Elements 9 was released in 2010. Since then (24 14 years), a helluva lot of features have been developed by the industry to help with photo color correction, image adjustments, and even creative tools. (Photoshop's content-aware tools can let you remove the flagpole that's behind your mom's head and replace it with realistic generic background. I use this tool nearly every day in my photography and imaging work. But it can also generate a 3rd hand for your mom, too!)

So you might want to look at several other programs on the market that can give you better tools to do what you're already doing, as well as more tools that you never knew you needed. Some of my favorites:

• Adobe Lightroom (comes in different versions for desktop, mobile, and cloud) https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom-classic.html
• Affinity Photo https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/
• Corel Photo-Paint https://www.coreldraw.com/en/pages/photo-paint/
• ABBYY Fine Reader https://pdf.abbyy.com/. Our shop uses this to capture documents (text and graphics), OCR them to make the text readable/searchable, and save as PDF or to MS Word. It could give you advanced tools for managing family documents. An added plus is that it can automatically connect to most major brand scanners, giving you one-click document conversion.

2. File formats

First, avoid the JPG/JPEG format because it is a lossy compression file format. That means it automatically compresses the file's data and degrades the quality of the image each and every time you save the file. Text is pixelated and not machine readable/searchable, colors are degraded, and artifact/halos start to appear around dark/light objects. They look like wavy lines around elements. Do this often enough on a file and you end up with a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox that looks like crud.

To retain the maximum quality, readability/searchability, and usefullness, I suggest using these file formats, especially for long-time storage or archiving of your family's documents: 

• JPG/JPEGs when they are the original camera "negatives" that haven't yet been opened or adjusted in software
• TIF/TIFF  for photos
• PNG for other types of graphics
• PDFs for anything with text
• PDFs for photos and graphics
• PDFs for the final archive file that will hold any of the above.

However, there's a critical catch to this: Garbage in = garbage out.

As you work with different file formats, quality can be degraded and text can be lost or made unreadable; you must always use the highest-quality version of the original scan or photo that you can acquire. These guidelines might help:

• Always scan at the highest resolution possible and maximize the number of pixels that are captured. This will create very large files, but they will also contain the detail you need to make them useful.
• When saving, don't compress the file — especially don't save a JPG/JPEG as noted above.
• When making PDFs, be sure to check the settings available in the software that is making the PDF. Ensure you're maximizing the resolution.

... secondly can you take a read only PDF and make it read illegible writing that is not very human eye readable.

Thank you

Des

By @Desmond3590442172ux

Can you give us more details about this?

Do you mean take cursive or print handwriting and OCR it? (OCR = optional character recognition https://www.ibm.com/blog/optical-character-recognition/).

If so, I don't know of any software that can do this with handwriting (cursive or print), but if it was available, it might be in Acrobat's OCR (newer versions) and ABBBY Fine Reader.

Good luck with the project. Hope this helps.