Preserve Memories, Digitize Old Photos
One of the most interesting and memorable projects you can do with a scanner is scan old family photos.
Many of us have old photos and photo albums that we may have inherited from our parents or grandparents, or maybe we know that the family photographic history is still stuffed in a relative's drawer or in the basement in several shoeboxes. The odds are pretty good that these old family photo memories will be tattered and not in good condition. They've either been damaged by poor storage conditions or time has just taken its toll as the photographs have slowly deteriorated.
Scan the Old Photos
Old photos are memories that do fade; but there is a way to protect, preserve, and pass these photo memories on to future generations. You can scan each photo, save it into a digital format, and with the use of a digital photo editing software program, restore the old photo.
Most family pictures survive as prints, so a print scanner or a flatbed scanner is the best tool to use. If the print is mounted in a mat, you can crop the mat out when you scan -- you don't have to remove the print to scan it. You can also scan prints mounted in album page as well as scan old glass plate negatives.
It’s likely that several of the photographs may have already begun to fade, but your scanner and image-editing software can do wonders by restoring old photos to their original look. If a family photo is faded, for example, you can increase contrast by using the curve adjustment in the scanner or the contrast adjustment in the editing software. Some scanners come with a dust and scratch filter already build in. This helps the restoration of the photos during the scan itself.
With each photo memory turned into a digital photo format and saved onto a CD or DVD, you will have increased the longevity of the old family photos, at least for a few more generations. And you can use the renewed old family photos to build family tree web pages or give them as gifts of newly printed photographs once they have been restored.
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