What is the best way to scan old photos so as to create good, high-quality digital images?

Thanks for helping a guy who wants to save some 70+ year old photos of his gramps.

a scan will not be better than the original, but you can touch up any problems with the original.

Now if you have negatives that is a different story.

This is a brother 3 in 1 printer scanner. Took an hour to do this to 1 picture.

Nice job!

TIme-consuming, but great result.

If I may ask, what photo retouching program did you use?

GIMP on the PC it is free and somewhat like photoshop

Thanks. I will give it a try.

Richj did a great with touch ups. Surface damage will always require tedious work digitally.

He has more patience than me! I'm the family archiver, so I usually just scan, do a bit of color correction, etc.

The earliest were from around 1906, with quite a few from the late 20s. Overexposure was something I never figured out. I'm not sure there's a viable solution that doesn't ruin it like plastic surgery.

Either way, scanning it means that you've created a digital image that can be shared and saved for many. Having gone through photos that haven't been seen by any for decades, sometimes I imagined them all being lost...

It also gave me an appreciation for choosing moments.

I am finding the GIMP program difficult to use. It isn’t intuitive, at least to me.

I dread doing it, but I guess I will have to buckle down and study the user guide.

Mike

I probably don't even use %25 of the features of gimp. It is a PITA