Saturday, December 4, 2010

Why Scan??

When I first heard that Heritage Makers consultants were offering scanning services to their clients, I thought to myself - why would someone want to scan their photos?

I know many of you are thinking the same thing, and the main answer is PRESERVATION of your precious photos and memories. You may feel like your photographs are safe, but if you, like I, have gone through boxes of old family photos, even ones that were "properly" stored in a good climate and temperature, they have lost much of their original quality, if not all of it. Now is the time to get those photos scanned!

1. Restoration
2. Sharing
3. Fading
4. Color Shift
5. Scratching
6. Disaster

1. RESTORE When I scan photos for my clients, I also restore them. This brings back the color to photos that most people didn't even realize had faded. I can also do more extensive restoration (see previous blog postings for samples) as well, but even just a simple "refeshing" of the photos really makes them a joy to see.

2. SHARE Often, a family will gather after the death of a loved one (or before) and determine how to "divide up" the photographs. This is a shame because not everyone gets to enjoy all of the photos. With scanning, all of the photos can be placed on CDs, making it possible to divide up the actual photos, but for everyone to have the digital images of each and every one. They are then ready to make prints of, or put into a Heritage Makers book for everyone to enjoy!

For information about the other four points above, see the article on Fading below as well as the Scan Cafe website. I have recently been introduced to this fine company and they do excellent work with scanning of slides, which is a service I could not previously offer.
Contact me to handle your photo or slide scanning today.

Fading, Fading...Gone!

Concern about fading in photography is as old as photography itself, and dates at least to a well-known "Fading Committee" established by the Photographic Society of London in 1855.

Faded Jarheads This 1994 photograph had been framed with an oval frame. Note how the area exposed to light has changed.

But the photos we are all most concerned about aren't quite that old! They date from 1936, with the introduction of Kodachrome film for 35mm slides, to about 1990, and it's these photos that are particularly in danger.

These photos were printed using a number of different variations on what is called a chromogenic process. That simply means that the surface on which the print is made does not already contain the dyes necessary to make the colors required. Rather, this process relies on a number of chemicals and chemical reactions to create the dyes, on the fly, at the time of processing. And it is the combination of dyes — typically, cyan (blue), magenta (red), and yellow — that creates the final colors we see in a color photo.

Unfortunately, these dyes — that is, these chemical reactions — are inherently unstable. In fact, they begin to degrade as soon as the photo is printed! And light hitting a photo — nearly any kind of visible light — simply accelerates this process. This is why packages of film have typically carried disclaimers about the fact that colors may fade over time.

Film BoxThis film box, bought in November 2008, carries the disclaimer "Since color dyes may change in time, Walgreens cannot warranty this film against any change in color."

Typically, there are two effects: a loss of detail in general, particularly in the highlights, and a color shift. As the magenta dye is most unstable when exposed to light, compared to the other two dyes, the result is a photo that can shift to a slightly greenish cast.

Over the last 50 years, there have been many different chromogenic approaches to making prints. As the work of image permanence pioneer Henry Wilhelm has shown, these approaches do vary widely in terms of potential image permanence. Unfortunately, the most popular of these — for example, Ektacolor-processed prints from the 1960's and 1970's — have tended to have significant fading problems when exposed to light.

Corrected FadingThis photo was slightly faded, and correction was straightforward under ScanCafe's standard service.

Prior to the availability of scanning and digital photography software, if your photos were faded you were largely out of luck.That's not true any more!

Depending on the degree of fading, an image can be scanned and then digitally adjusted using a variety of photographic management software tools, like the ones ScanCafe technicians use. However, if your photos are severely faded, it can be challenging to bring them back to life — so it's definitely in your interest to hurry.

Source: http://www.scancafe.com/image-preservation/fading