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How to Digitize a Photograph

The advent of digital technology has now made it easy to digitize your photo archive. For photographers who spent years or a career building an archive of film-based pictures, converting them to digital files provides another copy of their images should the originals become lost or destroyed. To convert the slides or film negatives, you need a scanner and computer. The better the scanner, the better quality digital file you will have.

Things You'll Need

Desktop or laptop computer
Flatbed scanner

Instructions

- 1
  Turn your home computer and scanner on.
- 2
  Organize the photos before you begin the scanning process. Taking the time to arrange the pictures either by date, subject or event will save time and make the process easier to follow.
- 3
  Open the software for the scanner on your home computer. In the software, create folders where the pictures you are about to scan will be saved. Create a folder for each of the categories you selected for your photographs.
- 4
  Lift the lid of the scanner and place the photo face down on the platen. Lower the lid and press the start button on the scanner or click the start button in the software.
- 5
  Review the scanned image in the software. Most scanning programs allow you to view the scanned imaged prior to saving it.
- 6
  Save the scanned image to the correct folders. Save the scan as a "TIF" file. This type of file format retains the most information from the scan. Having a large digital file for each picture will take up more space on your hard drive, but will give you more latitude should you need to edit the picture.
- 7
  Repeat the process for each picture until all of your images have been digitized.

Photography