My cousin Troy contacted me, asking some questions about scanning his mother’s photo albums. It got me thinking about my quest of scanning photos and I realize that I have a lot of knowledge and opinions on the subject, so I decided to write them down here.
Quality vs. Quantity
I remember when Google Photo Scan came out. It was easy to use, and I had a scan of my childhood memories? Sign me up! I remember borrowing all my parents photo albums and getting to work. I remember scanning most of them and I had a good collection of my childhood photos.
Years later, I was staring at a photo that my Uncle Gary had scanned and I was thinking “Wow, this photo is incredible quality, compared to the one I have. What’s the difference?”
I believe this photo was scanned using the Google Photo Scan app. Not bad.
This was scanned using a V600 scanner. While I am no expert on colour accuracy, since I don’t have the original in front of me as I type, you can see that the one taken with a scanner is better quality. If you take a look at the bottom right corner of the first photo, you can see white sprinkles. You also see evidence of these sprinkles in the middle of the photo..all around the first photo really! It’s just artifacts that Google Photo Scan leaves. Whereas, the V600, does not.
Also, the megapixels (which can be adjusted), is much higher on the second photo (21MP) vs. The google photo scan photo (9.2MP). You cannot adjust this on Google Photo Scan, whereas you can control those types of things on the scanner.
If your goal is to get through things fast, and you don’t mind the tradeoff in quality, then maybe Google Photoscan is a viable option. Maybe it’s even changed over the years and it’s a better product. It’s worth trying out to see if it’s suits your needs if you prefer quantity over quality.
But if quality is your goal, and long term preservation where you never have to scan these photos again…a proper scanner is probably your best bet.
Negatives vs.photo prints
If possible, scan the film negative instead of the printed photo. I was lucky that my mother taught me to keep all my negatives. My project benefited from scanning the negatives as the quality was even better than a great scan of a printed photograph! I wish I knew that from the beginning. I went from scanning prints from a photo album using Google PhotoScan, to scanning prints using a proper scanner, and then my uncle showed me the magic of scanning film negatives so I scanned film negatives as well! I’m still going through those film negative scans to try and organize things.
Scanner software
My cousin was asking me about a photo auto-crop service that is powered by AI that he found on the internet. You scan a page of an album, take the scan, upload it to a website and bam. They crop the photos, and spit out individual photos for you.
I’m sure it works, fine, but if you have some good scanner software, it already does that for you.
When I bought the V600 flatbed scanner, it came with Silverfast which seems to be a very powerful scanning software in the scanning community. I’m still trying to figure out different options I can use.
It does what Troy was asking about…I scan an entire page of an album, decide the DPI/quality of the scan I want, it auto-crops and spits out individual photos (JPG, or TIFF, or whatever format you choose), and even does colour correction that you can preview beforehand. Ever have those old photos that have an orange tinge to them? You can fix those with this software and it does it right away while scanning the photos.
Not a bad scan from the Google Photo scanner, right? It’s pretty good! But there’s an orange tint to it, which can probably be removed by some colour correcting software. Also, if you start zooming in, you will see the quality isn’t the best.
This photo was scanned using a Kodak film negative scanner. Now that I think about it, I didn’t even use scanner software to remove the orange tint…it just happened because I was scanning the film negatives. That being said, the difference is the same if I had an orange tinted print scan and used scanner software to remove the orange tint.
I notice in the film scan that there are artifacts like scratches and dust on it. That’s one thing I haven’t cared about touching up at this point in my project. I figure that’s an entirely new set of skills to work on when I’m retired!
Again, it really comes down to what you want out of your project. Do you want to keep the orange tint to evoke the memories of looking through an old photos album? Or are you looking for colour accuracy of the moment?
Speaking about colour accuracy, I remember borrowing Nanny’s photo albums and going to Wal-Mart to use their scanning booths. They had a colour correcting feature and I was toying around with it, thinking it was great. When I got back home, Nanny said “We look like we have been down in Jamaica for an entire year! Look at our skin!” I guess I went overboard with that! After that moment, I realized I should try and go for colour accuracy at all times, and I’m still not an expert on that stuff.
Back to the Silverfast scanner software…it was a steep learning curve and a lot of trial and error, but I feel that I’ve figured out what I like to do with it, and I think it makes my workflow easier. Other scanner softwares are probably comparable. Even those AI tools to auto-crop images might be useful if you have dozens of photos to go through and crop. But scanner software does a lot of that for you (and more!).
Conclusions
It’s Sunday morning, I’m starting to get hungry, and I’m realizing the only person who will read this is Troy and this blog post is probably overkill for his question. I’ll stop here for now, but I’m sure I’ll come back and add things when I think of them.
But if I had to look back on my entire photo scanning journey, I think I would have liked to have started with a dedicated scanning machine from the beginning, as I have spent a lot of time in my life just re-scanning the same photos using different methods (example: Google Photo Scan vs. V600 scanner). My goals were: 1) Quality over quantity 2) colour accuracy 3) sharing these memories with others. If my goals were quantity over quality, maybe I would have stuck with Google Photoscan, because it’s not a HORRIBLE application. It does the job, and it does it much quicker than scanning on a traditional machine.