Preserving Photos with Digital Photography
Hello scrapbooker!
Did you know that digital photography offers the key to preserving photos for future generations?
Over time, heat, moisture, light, smoke and other atmospheric conditions will rot printed photographs and cause them to fade. However, digital photography is forever. Scanned images, or images taken with a digital camera can be saved, stored, and preserved indefinitely. (Storage media can crash. Your mantra is "Backup, backup, backup.")
If you have old, heritage photographs, you're facing a special challenge if you preserve the printed versions. First, you might be reluctant to cut and crop your originals to place in your scrapbook. And, if the scrapbook is a gift for someone, you might not want to part with the original pictures.
When working with old, print photos that haven't faded substantially, one approach is to use photocopies in the scrapbook and store the originals. You'll want to photocopy the images using a color laser photocopier and snapshot quality paper. As an added bonus, you can resize the images, if desired. One warning; too much enlarging will result in loss of resolution.
If you don't have a color laser photocopier at your disposal, photocopying services will do the task for a reasonable fee.
Secondly, you might discover that the old black and whites are in better shape than the color snapshots that were introduced in the 1960s. Early color technology was poor; these snapshots are likely to have faded considerably. And, if you made the mistake, as I did, of putting your photographs in albums with sticky pages, you'll find plenty of damage and paper rot. Those organic, sticky albums are your snapshots' biggest enemy.
The solution lies in technology. First, remove your photos from their sticky backings. (Tip: use dental floss to remove the pictures).
Then, digitize, and use digital photography software to adjust the color tones, hues, brightness and contrast. While you're at it, you might remove red eye or any other undesirable artifact that shows in the picture. If colorizing a severely faded picture doesn't work well, try converting it to grayscale and tinkering with brightness and contrast. You might just get yourself a very elegant black and white image.
Speaking of digital photo editing software, many people swear by the highly popular Photoshop Elements 5.0 Window
. It's a smaller, simpler variation of the industry standard, but more cosly Photoshop CS3 software.
Finally, resize, crop, and print out your digital photography using glossy photograph-quality paper, available at Staples or other places where printer paper is sold. You'll need a good quality printer. If the budget can handle it, a color laser printer is the way to go. If not, a good quality bubble jet with will do an acceptable job. I'm happy with my Canon PIXMA iP4300 Photo Printer 
with its Think Tank™ system. It has five individual tanks of ink… one for each color.
Finally, preserve the life of your printouts or photocopies by spraying with a photograph preservative. The spray is available at places selling digital photography equipment and at some craft stores.
Thank You!
June Campbell
P.S. New to digital photography? Find out how you can take spectacular photographs with your digital camera in thirty minutes or less. Visit StartMyDigitalPhotography.com
Questions? Comments? Need support? Then
Home | Articles
© Copyright 2007 June Campbell - www.startmydigitalphotography.com
