These days we use digital cameras and store our pictures on Photo-Book sticks or in our computer. It really was not that long ago when we all used film and relied on the local chemist shop or camera store to convert the exposed film into semi–permanent images on paper.
We only have to look at the photographs we took only a mere twenty years ago to realise how impermanent these images are. They are faded, dog-eared, torn, creased or just missing - eg. stored away in some old shoe box in the back cupboard.
The first message about your photographs is to make backup copies of them. They are so precious and you probably only have one copy of them and it may still be in your camera. This means:
- Copy all your digital photo files to a CDROM or another hard drive for safe keeping . This means the photos currently in your camera too ! (- after you have copied them to your computer)
- Try and name directories/folders to put your photos in, with a name that is descriptive of what they are - eg. PhotosJohnAndJoanWedding
- Don’t ever work on the backup copy of your photographs - if you need one of the files from your backups - copy it from the backup to another location and work on that copy.
- Rename any altered files by adding a suffix to the existing file name. eg.
if you altered a copy of say DCM001 then name the altered copy DCM001A or better still DCM001A03082010 (DCM001A plus the date in the form DDMMYYYY) - this helps a lot later on when you are looking for or sorting your photographs
- Scan and digitise all your old photographs - it’s easier than you think. Buy a scanner at the local electronics store if you don’t have one. Even the cheap scanners do a very good job. Just remember:
- Scan at high enough resolution so that when printed at the size that you want, the photograph will still be at least 300 dots per inch (DPI). This is an easy concept - if you have 300 dots in a row, that is one inch long and you stretch it to three inches - then you still have 300 dots but only 100 per inch and the line of dots is starting to look a bit thin. The result in a photograph is that it will start to look a bit “grainy” and become poor quality once you start to go below 300 DPI.
- A good rule of thumb is that when you are scanning old small black and white photographs - scan at at least 600DPI and when you scan slides and negatives (yes most modern scanners can do this) do so at 1200dpi
- Give each scanned photograph a descriptive name - eg. JimAndHelenAtWarwickMarch1956 - again this helps you sort and find them later.
- Old black and white photographs often look better when converted to black and white [greyscale] (most scanners scan in colour and show up all the imperfections in contrasting colour unless you tell it otherwise)
- Once in the Memory Publisher™ programme you can convert black and white photographs to “Sepia” giving them an authentic touch and an increase in nostalgia.
- Make a backup copy of your scans as soon as you can - a lot of hard work went into making them
More on Resolution
- Due to tricks of the eye and the brain, pictures on the screen look quite OK at 72 dots per inch (about 28 dots per cm). This means that most photographs that you download straight off the screen from the Internet are only 72 DPI and are quite unsuitable for high quality printing (300 DPI).
- This also means that you may have low resolution photographs in your photo-book design and it looks OK on the screen but will unfortunately look a little grainy when printed.
- This is why the Memory Publisher™ program warns you when there is a low resolution photograph in your publication.
- You can experiment with this to help with understanding the concept of resolution:
- Place a small photograph on the Memory Publisher™screen
- Expand the photograph using the handles on the photoborder until the programme places a warning symbol in the centre of your photograph
- This warning will be because that, after stretching the photograph, the resolution has now reduced to the point that the printed result will become grainy.
- Now make the image smaller and at some point the image resolution is once again above the threshold and the warning sign disappears
- When you get this warning as you design your book, you can choose to proceed and publish (print) regardless - you may have no choice or
you could: - Rescan at a higher resolution if it was a scan of a photographic print or slide/negative
- Make the size of the image smaller till the warning sign disappears
- Use an external “paint” program to resample the image to give the impression of a higher resolution. This often works with low resolution digital camera images.
- Abandon the image altogether if you absolutely don’t want a grainy result
- At least you’ve been warned !
Rule of Thumb - Camera Resolution
A good indication of how big an image can be before it starts to degrade is in the table below. Pixels = dots in the image - Camera formats are selected from typical cameras on the market today. The aspect ratio of your camera may be slightly different.
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This means is that if you want a single photo to fill a page of A4 landscape book (approximately an effective 290mm wide) and be a good quality result, you would be better to use a photo from a camera with at least a 5 Megapixel resolution.
All this said, a lower quality photo will still look OK but will probably look a bit grainy to the critical eye.
You can also use a professional photo editing program to enhance the photo to allow expansion to larger sizes without as much degradation.
Do not let that stop you preserving those memories, a picture of any resolution will stir the grey cells and prompt recall of all those other great internal memories !!
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