Tips for Scanning Your Photos

I still have a lot of photos from my film cameras back in the day when there were no digital cameras. I really wish digital cameras were around at the time I gave birth to my daughter in 1997. Now I have tons of her baby photos that I want to scan so I can preserve them.

I’ve been researching for tips to scan photos and I am lucky to find this article at Scraps of Mind:

1. Most scanners will let you adjust the size of your photo. This is particularly good if you have some really old photos that are very small. I have a whole bunch of these from the ’40s and ’50s. You can’t go too big with these but you can at least double or perhaps even triple their size. That gives you more to work with.

2. We usually scrap at a resolution of 300 pixels per inch (ppi) but it’s a good idea to scan your photo at 600 ppi. This also has the effect of doubling the size of your photo when you drag it onto your 300ppi scrapbook layout file. Just be careful if you are combining this technique with the one above because you might end up with too granular an image.

3. Make sure you give the surface a good clean with a soft cloth before you scan and make sure the scanner bed is clean and dust free. If you have specks of dust on the photo or the scanner bed they will be picked up in the scan (and magnified if you have set the resolution higher) and they will become another problem that you need to correct.

You can find the rest of the tips at the ‘Tips for Scanning Your Photos’ article.

Image: sxc.hu