old photos - what do you do?

[ludovica]

I made the mistake of scanning all my pictures at a resolution suitable for web pages. After becoming familiar with Rootschat I now realise I need to do them all over again (except I dont have a scanner anymore)

[Woodentop50]

Christmas is coming !   

[Suttonrog]

Sara,

If you are going to scan them, then scan at the highest resolution you can and then save them as .tiff file. Tiff files are large and take up a lot of space but there is no degradation. Jpegs take up a lot less space but they are compressed and lose detail. Everytime you open a jpeg and then save it again it loses even more detail until you only have square blocks of pixels.

Keep your original Tiff files in a separate folder and back them up to separate CDs or DVDs and keep them in different locations. Save your restorations as jpegs but you always have your original tiffs to fall back on if you go too far.

Rog

[ludovica]

Sara,

If you are going to scan them, then scan at the highest resolution you can and then save them as .tiff file. Tiff files are large and take up a lot of space but there is no degradation. Jpegs take up a lot less space but they are compressed and lose detail. Everytime you open a jpeg and then save it again it loses even more detail until you only have square blocks of pixels.

Keep your original Tiff files in a separate folder and back them up to separate CDs or DVDs and keep them in different locations. Save your restorations as jpegs but you always have your original tiffs to fall back on if you go too far.

Rog

Wow.. useful piece of advice. I didn't know that

[Suttonrog]

I'll try this and see if it works.

The first image is a scaled down version of the original which was scanned at 1200dpi (don't worry it would never fit in the 500kb limit we have on this board.

The second image is a selection of my aunt (middle on the front row). On the left as in the original 1200 tiff file, on the right still at 1200 as saved as a jpg. I hope you will be able to see the degregation.

Rog

It worked

[oldtimer]

Hi Rog!

What a fantastic tip! I never knew anything about that! Looks like I am going to be very busy over the weekend re-scanning all my photos.

Thanks!