Scanning and Saving Old Photos

All of us probably have a box stored away that have old and torn photos in it. Once in a great while you remember that box and tell yourself you have got to get to it and take care of those pictures before it's to late. Some day something could happen and all the pictures could be lost. Take the time now to scan those old photos onto CD's and they will last forever.

Restoring photos is very worthwhile and easy to do. Digital photos can be used to create all sorts of neat projects like, scrapbooks, add to the family Web site, share them with friends and family through email and have prints made. You don't have to be a graphic designer to restore photos but you have to have a computer, a scanner and a graphic program.

So go get that box, sort through the photos you want to keep and follow these tips to restore those precious photos.

Look Over the Photos: Check every photo for dirt, lint, and smudges. You can gently remove dust and dirt with a soft brush or rag; don't press hard. You can also us a can of canned air, this will blast away the dust and lint but don't hold the can to close to the picture and don't use it on heirloom prints.

Check out Your Scanner: Check the scanner glass for lint, hair, fingerprints and smudges. Use a lint-free rag to wipe the glass clean or you can use a household glass cleaner to clean the glass as long as you don't spray directly on the glass, spray directly on the rag, and then clean. When handling your scanner and photos, remember that your skin is oily and could leave smudges. It is best to wear white cotton gloves; you can purchase a pair at a photos shop or a hardware store.

Type of Scan: When working with photos you have a choice of black and white or color photos. Dealing with family photos, it is best to scan them in color, even if the photo is in black and white. Doing it this way gives you more options plus you can change the color photo to black and white but you can't change black and white to color.

Resolution: To ensure the quality of your photos it's best to use a minimum of 300dpi (Dots Per Inch). This assures you a decent quality for any kind of enhancement techniques you chose. If you can go larger, the better quality for storing photos on CD or DVD's.

Position of Your Photo: Carefully lay the photo face down on the scanner glass, just like you would in a regular photocopier. Next, hit the "prescan." Your scanner will take a scan of your photo so you can see what it looks like. Make sure the photo is straight, no part is cut off, and that there are no little specks showing up; this would be dust or lint.

Crop if You Need To
Some scanners will crop the picture for you so you don't have to do anything. But if you do, you want to make sure you crop only the picture and nothing else. Later you can crop a potion out of a picture if you want too.

Editing the Image
Don't worry about trying to correct any problems while you are scanning. You'll be able to edit with your graphic software program later. Just scan all pictures and save to your computer.

Computer Memory
You'll need to know how much free space you have on your computer if you want to do a large file of photos. Most computers can handle 34MB photo file but some can't. If you think you might have a problem then adjust the scan resolution for your photos.

Scanning
If you are scanning at a high resolution then it might take a few minutes for the picture to scan the lower resolution the faster the scanning.

Now you are ready to save your photos to your hard drive and use your photo-editing program.

The most popular file type is the JPG. This is good to use for Web pages and file sharing; it creates a smaller file size. If you want to save archive photos or restoring damaged photos you will want to us TIF (Tagged Image Format), this offers the best quality over the JPG format. Each time you modify a photo using JPG you lose a small amount of image quality.

Archive a Copy
Always save a copy of the original photo by placing it in a special folder on your hard drive or copy it to a CD. Don't change; edit this photo, no matter how bad it looks. This is called preserving the item as closely to the real thing as possible. This will outlive the original forever.

Editing Your Scanned Copy
In order to play with a photo, it's best to make a copy of it and play with that one.