Digitizing and Restoring Prints

Most of our readers, we believe are longtime photography enthusiasts. Consequently, they would be having many photographs with some of them preserving priceless memories.

- Ashok Kandimalla

Unfortunately, these are difficult to archive, retrieve and view. They deteriorate over time too. The best way to solve all the problems mentioned is to digitize them.

A film photograph is created using one of the two types of media – viz., negatives or slides (transparencies). The former is used for creating prints. The latter can be used for projection and can also be used to make prints, though this is less common.

For this article, we will concentrate on how to digitize prints as negatives and slides need specialized equipment. We will also look at a few simple postprocessing techniques to restore and correct imperfections.

If you are going to use one, follow the scanner instruction manual to get the optimum results. Use the best quality JPEG for the scanned output file. Most importantly use 300 PPI (pixels per inch) as the scanning resolution. Contrary to what many think, scanning at more than 300 PPI is a waste as there will be nothing in the print to capture beyond this. It will only lead to unnecessarily large files.

If you do not have access to a scanner, a D-SLR (or an MLC) with a pixel count of around 24 MP can be used to photograph prints to accomplish digitization. One advantage of this method is that there is no limitation on the size of a print, a problem that you would face if you use a scanner.