For the past couple of years, my wife Susan has really been into the studying and tracing of her family history. Genealogical research is a complex process that involves more than affixing a collection of names on a pedigree chart. Genealogy involves identifying ancestral or descendant families by using historical records to establish biological, genetic, or familial kinship. Oftentimes, Susan spends entire afternoons and evenings on the computer doing her research.
One of the ways I have been able to help her is by going through old family photos and Christmas photo cards that she has collected over the years and scanning them into the computer. Some of the old photos are perfectly clear and don’t need any digital restoration at all. However, quite a few of the antique photos have lost a little bit of their sharpness or need to have marks or obvious cracks removed.
This is where programs such as Microsoft Picture It (which is installed for free on some computers) or Adobe Photoshop come in handy. Not only can old photos be cleaned up, but other editing features can also improve these older photos. The old photos can be resized or cropped, the brightness and contrast changed, or in the case of color photos, the color balance restored and red-eye removed. Once these procedures are used, new, digital files of the photos can not only be saved onto a hard drive or disc (CD or DVD), but the photos can be printed out, framed, and hung on a wall for all to see. It’s priceless to now have the ability to create digital photos of old family photos taken before this technology was in place.
For Susan, digitally restoring and preserving these family photos of long-gone relatives has brought her many hours of joy and happy tears.