Digitize Paper Photos

In order to Digitize Photos, you must buy a pretty good scanner - possibly a flatbed. If you can afford it, a flatbed can be bought for about $220 and should make photos digital at 600 dpi. The more dots per inch, the more detailed your photographs can be. If you broke like our government, you can get a solid flatbed scanner for under $100 and it should transfer photos to digital at 1200 dpi.

When or if you ever buy your scanner, there should be instructions on how to connect your PC to your brand new scanner. Next comes the driver - install it and the computer will be ready to talk to it.

Now you are ready to scan the photos in. Place them face forward (if you are using a flatbed) and allow it to zap those pics into your PC. This will take a while - depending on how many pictures you have.

When you are finished - use Photoshop to remove dust particles out of the pixels. Also, you can eliminate red-eye in humans and animals. Lastly, sharpen or alter your colors.

There are some people who are so busy with their lives, they really don't have the time of day to scan or edit their pictures. In this case, they make take them to a service to digitize photos. These businesses are equipped in scanning tons of photos in a matter of a few hours. They can alter your images of your photos once they are scanned in and look very professional. The cost could be around 40 cents per picture but I have though, seen some prices as high as 75 cents per picture, but that is the exception - not the norm.

To summarize, if you need to digitize just a few photos, you can do it yourself and then alter the images with Photoshop or a cheaper version of an image editor. However, like most of us, if you don't have time, then you can take them to a business that specializes in scanning a large number of pictures in a short amount of time. Just be willing to pay a pretty penny for them.