Photographs from yesteryear don’t always have the print quality that you would like to see in a framed photograph. The quality of a photo doesn’t need to be the deciding factor on whether it stays in the family photo album, only shared on occasion, or if it’s framed and displayed proudly and permanently to enjoy every day by all.
Updating Old Photos Starts with a Digital Print
A great advantage of digital is that you don’t need to do anything with the original, so you don’t need to worry about causing any further damage to your photo. Creating a digital copy of your photo is best done using a flatbed scanner. Most all-in-one at home printers have a flatbed scanner. If yours doesn’t, check your phone’s camera app as some smartphones have a scan feature integrated into the camera app. It won’t give you a great quality scan, but it will give you enough to work with. The majority of phones save scanned images as PDF files so it’s likely you will need to convert the PDF to JPEG or another format for it to be compatible with photo editing software.
Something else of note is the quality of scan you get. To capture the most details in a scan, use the scan setting of 600 dpi (dots per inch) as that will ensure the most details are captured. Some scanners can scan higher than 600 dpi, but it’s more likely it will increase the file size without capturing any more details.
The last step in scanning is saving the file in the most compatible format. If you have a perfectly preserved photograph that doesn’t need any retouching to improve the print quality, you can save the file as a PNG or JPEG, both of which will be ready to print with sufficient details. However, if you plan to make any edits to the photo using photo editing software, the file type best suited is TIFF (Tag Image File Format) and that’s because all other file types involve some compression, which is only done to reduce the file size, helping to preserve memory on devices. TIFF images retain all the pixels in the scan so there’s no loss.
Making Edits to Your Scanned Prints
The older your print is, the more likely it is for it to benefit from some retouching to bring it up to modern print quality. Some of the most common problems photo editing can help fix are:
- Restoring colour to faded photographs
- Filling in tears or fold lines on scans of originals
- Using colour fill for repairing spot damage caused by dust particles and other air pollutants that tend to crack the emulsions on printed photography
Once you have your image scanned and know what your photos need to improve them, then search online for a “photo editing software” for ___ such as “for faded photographs” or “removing crease lines”. Some of the simpler edits can be done with web-based photo editors, whereas more complex photo editing may require a software download.