Digitise your old photos

What we often forget about our old photos is that their value increases with time.

Few people regularly dig out last year’s holiday snaps from their box, yet we often can’t wait to see the ones we took 10 or 20 years ago.

What’s more, photos taken by parents and grandparents can become family treasures.

Yet while all these photos are gaining in significance, they’re also degrading.

Black and white photos tend to survive fairly well through the generations because the chemistry of the prints is simple.

Colour prints are different. The dyes used in these prints are far less stable, so they are prone to fading and colours can change over time.

In this article we’ll show how to digitise old photos before it’s too late, repair some of the damage and fading and share these memories with your family and friends. Old photos are precious and they need to be saved for posterity.

Scantastic
Almost any scanner, whether it’s a standalone flatbed model or one built into a multifunction device, will produce excellent scans of photo prints.

The Canon Pixma MP210 is a multifunction printer and scanner that does a fine job but costs just £46, so it’s ideal for those on a budget. Alternatively, HP’s Scanjet G4050 is a great scanner that can capture images from film as well as prints.

Flatbed scanners are a little like photocopiers. The original is placed face-down on a sheet of glass, called a platen, for scanning, but instead of a paper copy the scanner produces a digital file rather like the ones made by a digital camera.

Scanners come with a scanning program for the computer. This sometimes works as a standalone program, but others must be started from within an image-editing program, such as Adobe’s Photoshop Elements. Generally, using a scanner is a three-step process.

First, the scanner performs a fast, low-resolution preview scan so the software can show what’s on the scanner. Sometimes this happens when the software is launched, but other programs wait until the user clicks on a preview button.

Once the preview scan has appeared, the user can then crop the image ­ selecting the part they want to scan ­ and set the resolution at which it will be scanned. There are usually other adjustment options, too and we’ll explain these later.

Finally, once the user is happy they can start the final scan. This will usually take a little time, but once it’s finished the image will be either saved as a file on the computer’s disk, or more usually opened in the image-editing software for it to be adjusted if necessary.

Some scanners have fully automatic modes that preview the image, choose options automatically and then start the main scan.

This can save time, but the software won’t always select the best options. For this reason, even if your scanner does have a fully automatic mode, it’s best to familiarise yourself with how to change the scanning resolution and set other options yourself ­ fortunately, this is easy.