SOFTWARE

Digital Image

Scanning for Newbies - How to Convert Old Photos, Slides and Negatives Into Digital Images

For people who need to keep a lot of old photos, slides and negatives at home or in the office, there is a smart way for them to preserve these items. They just need a specialized scanner to assist them. Nowadays, we are moving towards digital photography. By using the scanner and the image processing software, you can convert your old photos, slides and negatives into digital images easily. Let me share with you some useful tips on how to deal with these old items.

• First thing first, in order to obtain the best result for the digital images, you need to have a good scanner. If you haven't got any scanner, you are advised to buy one which comes with special features. For instance, the scanners should be able to restore colors effectively and the dust and scratches of the slides and negatives are well taken care of. Besides, you need to make sure that the scanner can be used to scan photos, slides as well as negatives.

• After you have got the scanner ready, let's move on. Turn both the computer and scanner on. Do the necessary setting on the scanner for either slides or negatives. Now, here is an important step. Before you place the old photos, slides or negatives on the scanner, you need to clean them first. You are recommended to clean each slide or strip of negatives with an anti-static cloth. This particular cloth helps to minimize the natural static electricity which attracts dust. In order to get clear scanned images without any spot or line, you need to make sure that your slides or negatives are clean so that you don't need to waste time doing the touch-ups.

• After the cleaning job is done, you can then place the photos, slides or negatives into the carrier tray and start scanning. The duration of scanning may be long if you have too many items to be scanned at one time.

• When you have scanned certain photos, slides or negatives, you can first preview the images first from your computer before you print them out. In order to store all the necessary images in a proper manner, you are advised to organize the scanned images into different folders and name each folder accordingly. You can arrange them based on dates, locations or subjects. By doing so, you can refer to the images easily in the future.

Last but not the least, converting the old photos, slides and negatives into digital images and storing them in your personal computer are not sufficient. You need to take one additional step. You need to back up all the images to an external hard disk or CDs. It will be more secured for you to do so because sometimes your computer may be attacked by viruses and you will lose all the important files.

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How do I make a digital image that is blurry clear?

I have seen on television where they use a program that can take a blurry image and turn it into an image that can be clearly seen. Are there any programs available to do this?

Hmm, I don't know what you saw on TV, but generally speaking, you start bumping against some limitations pretty quickly.

One person suggested the sharpen filter - which *can* be useful, but depending upon the size of blur, there are ususally better options.

There are two programs (that I'm aware of) on the market to do just what you've mentioned. They are
Focus Fixer by Fixer labs

http://www.fixerlabs.com/EN/photoshop_plugins/focusfixer.htm

and Focus Magic

http://www.focusmagic.com/

I believe you can get free demos of each of these to try on your picture.

Please bear in mind that if the original file is a JPEG and it's blurry, well, most hope is lost. Jpeg uses lossy compression, which will obliterate those minute details used to extract the original-ish information in the image.
Rule of thumb, if the image *takes* as much space as one that's 1/4 it's normal Jpeg size, well, it probably has that much info in it too.

The other limitation has to do with signal to noise ratio. Generally speaking, the images you work with have only 256 shades of brightness (that's for 16 million colors). If the blur spreads very large (see the links above for what *isn't* too large) then information gets truncated. It's like trying to make a curve with lego blocks. Information of the curve is *gone*.

Finally, in the scientific community de-blurring, and de-noising has been studied a lot. A quick jog down "image deconvolution" lane will reveal several methods, the most common being
the Richardson-Lucy algorithm and Weiner filtering

http://www.bialith.com/Research/BARclockblur.htm

You'll find that in this discipline, it's always a trade-off of blur size and removal of noise.

The bottom line is this - it's messy to try to clean up photos. Lenses are not as simple as gaussian blurs, and when trying to re-sharpen a significantly blurred image, it's usually not worth it, unless you don't mind mucking with the image for quite a while.

If you're familiar with the Gimp, there's a rather good filter called Iterative-Refocus, which... hmm, I think is just using Weiner filtering (but don't quote me on that). And I use it from time to time. Unforutnately, it's rather slow.

If you're talking about *sharpening* an already in-focus image, well, that's a different subject all together, and we won't dive into it right now.

Hope that helps!
-Anonymous

Lecture 1 Introduction to Digital Image Processing