A New Sideline

I received the printed photo album a few days ago. It has turned out amazingly well. As good as expected. I think this is a viable way of saving space and enabling the preservation of old treasured photographs.

I do not know the archival life of the photo books but they are made with “acid free” paper. It is not the books that I am counting on for the preservation. It is the digitalization of the photograph on which I am banking. The book is just a great way to display them and share (books) with other family members.

In the pictures here, you can see the size difference with a regular album and the book. The inside view shows the book photo is every way as good as the original print. If desired, a digitally edited photo can be much better than the existing original print. I did some cropping and color correction especially on some color photos.

This book was a demo so I mixed color and B&W freely on the pages. The whole book process is color, but the prints do not have to be.

As I said, the preservation is the digitization of the old prints. There is a lot of speculation and discussion on the life expectancy of digital storage media. CD and DVD are the most popular. However, some low cost disks have failed and become unreadable in as little as one year. Brides are shocked to find out their wedding video’s no longer play after the first year.

There are high quality disks available, but you won’t find them at the usual computer or office supply store. Some claim life as high as 300 years, but how will I know? In 5 years there will no doubt be a totally new archive system invented.

The point is a digital file can be multiplied and saved in many ways. The original chemical emulsion light sensitive original photo can only continue to deteriorate. If you try to restore that, you only get one chance to get it right. No so with digital processing.

Here is what I used: HP Scanjet II, Windows XP, Adobe Lightroom Beta, Adobe Photoshop CS, Kodak EasyShare. Total 333 out of 345 photos made it to the book. I edited out some almost exact dupes from the original album.

My plan is to do more of this for myself and offer the service to anyone else. I will probably create a web site to show off the results.