Memorial Video: Fixing Photographs

Nothing makes a memorial video or a personal history project come alive better than photographs. In this blog I am going to tell you how to scan them and how to fix them so they'll sparkle in your work.

First, a warning. Never, ever take photos out of their albums. Albums do more than keep them protected. They provide contextual information. If you are having trouble dating a particular image, the chances are that the nearby images were pasted in at around the same time - so you can look for clues there. Also, grandma sometimes wrote captions on the pages and that information will be lost forever once the image goes.

Scanning. It can be confusing. All those settings. High resolution sounds good but it's slow and takes up disk space. Low resolution is quick, the files are lean and Emailable, and the result looks good enough on the screen. Right? Well, maybe. Here are the rules you should follow:


If you are ever going to print the images, even maybe, then set the scanner at a minimum 300 dpi (dots per inch). 300 dpi is a good resolution for printing. For smaller photos, use 400 or even 600 dpi. For slides and negatives, use a minimum of 1200 dpi (I use 2400)

If you are only want to use the image on screens and in emails, iPods, phones etc, scan at 72 dpi. TVs and computers operate at 72 dots per inch (and on them it looks good). But here's the thing. Can you ever rule out printing the image? I doubt it. Given the effort to get the image to the glass, you are better off getting it right first time.

So, always scan at a minimum of 300 dpi. Too large to email? Cut it down later. Files too large to store? Hmm. Have you seen the price of external hard drives lately? They are cheap. (Last time I checked you could get 500GB for just over $100.)

And clean the scanner glass first, then blow the dust off the glass and then the image with a can of "Dust Off". This is especially important for slides and negatives. Itsy bitsy dust is all but invisible - but once you see the image in close-up, that dust mote will look like a boulder!

What about that "descreening" button? Only use it for newspaper, magazine or book images (halftones) or images printed on textured paper. Color restoration? Backlight correction? Sharpening? Experiment. (Although I prefer not to check any of those boxes and instead use my photo editing software.)

Alright. You have a scanned image. You open it up on your computer. Chances are it looks ...OK. Do you need to learn Photoshop to fix it? No. There are five main fixes that you can make on almost any came-with-the-computer program (like Microsoft Office Picture Manager) or simple programs like Google's Picasa. If you are careful, you can make the scanned image look better than the original!

Here are my five steps to fix photos: 1. Rotate (by degrees): Straighten those crooked horizons. 2. Crop. Cut out all that unnecessary sky or that garbage can or other useless background (or the white of the scanner lid). Let's get up close with the action. 3. Adjust color tone: maybe the image looks too washed out so boost saturation; maybe there's an unwelcome color tint - so adjust "hue". Then: 4. Correct for red eye (pets included).

Now here comes the most important one: 5. Fix contrast. The reason that a lot of images look terrible is that they don't have a full tonal range - they look "flat" or muddy. Once you boost the contrast so the blacks are black (not dark grey) and the whites are white (and not milky) - the image will really "pop". Play around with the "auto correct" or "I feel lucky" buttons to get the contrast working for you.

And always save the result under a different file name. You will want to keep your original scanned copies in case you change your mind later about your improvements.


Learn more about what to include in your Memorial Video: Memorial Video Advice