A new engraving has arrived, so I've gone through the process of cleaning it up and prepping it using the Gimp instead of Photoshop. This is the procedure, updated from the previous PS procedure:

• Archive the original image in a backup folder (backup, parallel to mariage_5).
• Open in Gimp. Previously we would have converted to RGB, but I see no reason to do that; I left this at grayscale. Save into the scans folder.
• Using the magic wand, select some background grey or speckle, and delete. Play around with this step until you've got a relatively clean image, without losing detail. You might also use Select / By Colour if that helps without deleting anything important.
• Clean up the edges of the image, along with any egregious surface marks in the picture.
• If there's a BN mark with a ruler, it can be moved in closer to the image sometimes, to keep the size down.
• Crop the image to remove excessive whitespace around the outside.
• Resize the image using Bicubic to create one 800px wide. Save this image at around 90% quality, for an image size of two to three hundred K, with the wv_ prefix, into the scans folder.
• Undo the resize to get back to the original image, then start selecting a thumbnail area; once the selection has started, press the Shift key to constrain it to a square. Copy the selection to the clipboard.
• Click on File / Create / From Clipboard to create a new thumbnail image.
• Resize this image to 200 x 200, then save to the images folder with the thumb_ prefix.
• Copy the main image file and the web view )wv_) file from scans to exist_db/mariage/anthology/images.
• Create a new XML file in exist_db/mariage/anthology/images linking to the full size image file in the same directory, and add all the metadata.
• Update the server directories and db.

I haven't created the XML file in this case yet, because I don't have any metadata at all about this image.