Old prints fade. Digital photographs stay fresh, but—squirreled away on your hard drive—linger just one technical hiccup away from oblivion. You've spent thousands of dollars on your travels. You've spent countless hours shooting pictures to remember them by. Now it's time to secure your travel photos, whether they be paper or pixels, for the long term. But how? "The short answer," says Daniel Westergren, Traveler's senior photo editor, "is to scan your old pictures, print your favorite new ones, and back everything up." That may sound daunting, but as you'll see, the process is straightforward and, at least in parts, actually fun.
1. Rescue Your Albums
If your photo albums are stored in the attic or basement, retrieve them—now. High humidity may have already ruined your pictures. Replace moldy or damp albums with new ones that have acid-free, adhesive-free pages, and store them in a cool, dry place.
2. Make Scans
Next, make digital scans of all or part of your collection. This will, in effect, halt further degradation of the images. "Digital pictures can remain as perfect a thousand years from now as they are today," says author and photographer Lester Lefkowitz, who teaches courses at the International Center of Photography in New York City.
Easiest, of course, is to have someone else do the scanning. ScanCafe.com, for example, will scan your slides, negatives, and prints for prices starting at under a quarter each. You get back your original pictures along with a DVD holding the scans. Other companies with similar services are ScanMyPhotos.com, Britepix.com, and Hollywoodfotofix.com.
Or scan the images yourself. You can buy a dedicated film scanner that handles negatives and slides or a flatbed scanner that handles prints as well. Prices start at under $200.
"If you have the negative of a picture—and a good quality scanner—scan the negative, not the print," advises Lefkowitz. "The negative will give you a sharper result." If your scanner is of lower quality, scan the print.
More scanning tips from Lefkowitz and other imaging experts:
• For prints, set the resolution of the scan, expressed as dots per inch (dpi), to 300, if you'll be making same-size prints of the original picture. For enlargements, set the resolution to 600 dpi.
• For 35mm slides or negatives, scan at 2,000 dpi or higher.
• Before scanning, blow or brush dust off the film or print. "The less you touch it directly, the better," Lefkowitz says.
• Save the scan as a jpeg image set to the highest quality setting (with least compression). Don't correct the color, sharpness, or other attributes of the picture while scanning. Make a copy of the scan to edit, then archive the original scan.
• Even if the photo is black and white, set the scanner to color. This will result in a scan that you can decide to tint later if you wish.
3. Fix Your Pics
When the scanning is finished, take a breath. The tedium is over. Now comes the fun part—bringing your faded, flat photos back to life. "It's amazing how good the results can be," Lefkowitz says. "I scanned an old, wrinkly black-and-white print taken of my mother and her two sisters on a trip to town years ago. I colorized it, blew it up to 8x10, and made fresh prints for the three girls. Everyone cried."
Broadly speaking, the steps to editing a photo are:
1. Open the scanned picture within an image-editing program.
2. Fix the picture.
3. Save the edited image as a new file.
You've got plenty of choices in image-editing software. Most digital cameras come bundled with image editors that will do the job. Apple OS X has iPhoto built in. PCs running Windows XP or Vista should be upgraded with Windows Live Photo Gallery, with improved editing features. Three other free editors are Picasa, which is basic and easy to use; GIMP, which is more powerful and complicated; and Paint.NET, which is somewhere in between.
The two essential editing steps to fixing old, faded pictures are:
1. Adjust the color.
2. Increase the contrast.
"With prints, you need to goose up the blues and greens," Lefkowitz says, "because they fade first, leaving behind a red cast. Then increase the contrast to bring back the blacks, so your image doesn't look washed out." Controls to make these adjustments vary with editing programs. GIMP has sliders for adjusting reds, greens, and blues individually. Picasa and Paint.NET adjust color balance with single sliders. Master the controls, and you can fix a photo in less than a minute. Easy as that.
Or push yourself to do more—crop out dead space, for example, or amp up the saturation and sharpness to make the image more vivid. Fix a scratch. Try converting an old color print to black and white. Or tint it just a bit. Play around to see what looks good. Save the edited photo as a new jpeg file. Having fun yet? If so, consider stepping up to a commercial editing program. With Photoshop Elements 7, for example, or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate, you can go wild: Remove a light pole (or ex-spouse), change backgrounds, add text and a frame, transform the picture into a watercolor painting, slap your own face on the Statue of Liberty.
"I have a collection of 500 different skies that I choose from to improve an image," says Lefkowitz. "Last summer, for example, I shot an Oklahoma wheat harvest and replaced the boring, overcast sky. That's okay, because I'm an industrial photographer. If I were a photojournalist, they'd put me in jail for that."
Ironically, as these image editors have added features over the years, they've also become easier to use. The latest Paint Shop Pro, for example, creates "high dynamic range" photos, a trendy technique in which images of the same scene, shot at varying exposures, are merged into one. Yet the program's "fade fix" control has boiled down the correction of an old picture to one step. Click, you're done. Likewise, Photoshop Elements 7, released in October, has a guided editing mode that trains you how to edit a picture, as well as "quick fix" tools for brightening skies, for example.
To get started, watch videos of these programs in action on YouTube. Also check out the informative video tutorials at www.photoshoponline.com. They explain how to use a free Flash-based image editor available on the website.
4. Back Up Your Collection
Once you've scanned and corrected your collection, don't let a house fire or faulty hard drive obliterate your work. Back it up.
"Today, storage is so cheap, there's no excuse not to do backup," says John Larish of Jonrel Imaging Consultants in Rochester, N.Y. "Terabyte [1,000-gigabyte] hard drives are now affordable [under $200]. I remember the first IBM one-gigabyte card, costing $1,000 each."
Make your backups automatic and redundant, Larish advises. "I store my photos three ways—on my computer's internal hard drive, on an external hard drive, and off premises. I also burn DVDs of my images. I guess that's four ways."
You can set up your Windows XP or Vista operating system to automatically back up selected files or folders to another drive on a schedule. Or, for better performance, choose a third-party software program, such as Home Genie Backup Manager or Backup Now 5 . For online backup (immune to computer theft or house fires), three reasonably priced (about $50 a year) choices are SOS Online Backup, Carbonite, and Mozy, which offers two gigs of storage for free. With all these products, you choose which folders to back up. Set it and forget it.
Oh, except for the fact that, as Larish points out, you need to migrate your home backup files, over time, to the latest storage media, whatever they may be. "Remember Zip disks?" he says, referring to a storage product that was common in the late 1990s but is now all but obsolete.
5. Print it
No matter how many digital copies you have of your photo collection, also make paper prints of your most prized images. Prints can last for decades, if not centuries.
For do-it-yourselfers, Lefkowitz recommends Epson printers loaded with Durabright pigment inks. "Whatever brand of printer you choose," he says, "use the manufacturer's own paper and their best inks, listed on their websites. Don't mix paper and ink brands."
The easier route, as with scanning, is to let someone else do the printing. All three of the major online processing labs—Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Kodak Gallery—use long-lasting archival papers and inks, with Snapfish claiming its prints will last over a hundred years in "typical home display" without fading.
Or forget about prints altogether and showcase your Hawaii vacation in a custom-published book. Layout options have become more refined in the past couple of years, with themed templates, including travel, and even branded designs, including, yes, Martha Stewart. The three online photo finishers listed above will step you through creating a soft- or hardbound book from your uploaded photos with prices starting at $6.
Or design a coffee-table book at Blurb or Lulu, and you can also sell it to the public through their online stores. This three-pronged strategy—scan, back up, and print—will make your picture collections more or less permanent. "Unlike in the old days," says Lefkowitz, "you've now got the tools to preserve your travel pictures for many generations into the future."