You can digitize old photos from family albums or rare photos of celebrities using a regular digital camera or flatbed scanner. This will allow you to create archives of digitized photos and save scans of photos in the best quality.
You can save black-and-white photos of a family archive, military chronicles or footage of the country's history for an unlimited time by converting them into digital format. Priceless documents, faces in faded photographs are kept in family albums, lie in boxes. They crumble, deteriorate from moisture, break from dryness, fade. These photos and documents cannot be repeated, just as it is impossible to return the past time. They need to be preserved so that the descendants remember their roots, their history and value it. It is one thing to just hear about the war, and quite another to see the face of your great-grandfather in military uniform before leaving for the front, to catch a common family resemblance, to feel the commonality of the past and the present.
Digitizing with digital cameras
One way to digitize old photographs is to take a photo with a digital camera. Transfer and save the resulting files to a separate folder on your computer without additional image processing or after retouching and enhancement in photo editors. By sorting all the images, you can create large archives.
The disadvantages of this method include glare, distortion when photographing, if an amateur photographs. It is better if it is done by a professional photographer with special equipment. It is not cheap and, if there are a lot of old photos, then this method becomes very expensive.
Digitizing with a scanner
The alternative way to digitize photos is much easier. It is available to a computer user who has the status of an advanced user.
It is enough to scan a photo, save it in a separate folder and expensive pictures will be available both for viewing on any computer, laptop or mobile device, and for printing copies.
It is better to use flatbed scanners with a resolution of approximately 2400 DPI and higher for this purpose. The scanners included in the MFP kit (printer + scanner + copier) are designed mainly for photocopying documents and do not give a high-quality image when scanning.
Find a scanner in your computer's devices, right-click "scan" and, after scanning is complete, save the file in the appropriate format.
If you intend only to print it, then save it in the Photo format.
If you want to save the resulting image in the best possible quality, then choose the BMP format. This format takes up to several hundred megabytes, so keep in mind that there may not be enough space on your computer for all photos digitized in this way.
The most common JPEG format compresses any image, so loss of quality will be inevitable, but not critical. But it will allow you to save a lot of files on your computer and create a large archive.
After saving the scanned images, they can be processed in any graphics editor. Better, of course, is Adobe Photoshop, but Paint Net is also fine.
It is urgent to digitize old photos, without wasting time. It is not uncommon for the heirs to take out piles of old albums with photographs to the trash, having no desire or opportunity to keep the history of departed people.
Who knows which old album, which house may contain unknown photos of famous writers or departed politicians. Maybe your ancestors once took a picture with the Chelyuskinites or Lyubov Orlova? Digitize the story frozen in old photographs for posterity, take your time.
