Scanning photos so they hold up in a video
Okay. We've spent all our time so far on tapes. Let's talk about photos, because they behave completely differently once you drop them into a video, and almost nobody scans them right the first time.
A photo that looks fine printed can look terrible on a screen. Too small, too dark, edges cut off wrong, or scanned at a resolution that turns into mush the second you zoom in on it in your editor. We're going to fix all of that before it becomes a problem.
Why scanning settings actually matter here
When a photo just sits in an album, resolution doesn't matter much. Your eye fills in the gaps.
Video is different. You're often panning across a photo, or zooming in slowly on someone's face, or holding it full-screen for four seconds. Any weakness in the scan shows up big. A photo scanned too small will look blurry the moment you enlarge it even a little, and you will want to enlarge it, because most old photos have a lot of dead space around the person you actually care about.
So the rule I use: scan at 600 dpi minimum for anything you plan to zoom into. If it's a photo you'll show at a normal size, 300 dpi is fine. When in doubt, scan high. You can always shrink a file down later. You cannot add detail that wasn't captured.
Getting it done at home
You don't need a fancy scanner. A flatbed scanner, the kind built into a lot of home printers, works fine. Here's how I do it:
- Clean the glass first. Dust and hard water spots show up as little white flecks on your scan, and once they're scanned in, you're stuck editing them out one by one. A microfiber cloth and a little glass cleaner, wiped dry, takes care of it.
- Lay the photo flat and square. Crooked scans mean you're straightening every single one in software later. Line it up with the edge of the scanner bed.
- Scan as a photo, not a document. Most scanner software has a mode for "photo" versus "text" or "document." Document mode compresses things in a way that's fine for a receipt and bad for a face.
- Save as a TIFF or a high-quality JPEG. TIFF is the better file for archiving, but it's huge. If storage is tight, a JPEG saved at maximum quality is fine for video purposes. Just don't save, edit, and resave a JPEG over and over, because it loses quality every time you do that.
- Name the file with what you actually know. Not "scan001.jpg." Something like
1978_grandma_kitchen_unknownwoman.jpg. You're going to be dating and identifying these later, in a different lesson, and you want your file names doing some of that work already.
Where to scan and what to check
Scan at your actual working spot, not standing over the machine at the library for two minutes per photo. You want to be able to check each scan before moving to the next one. Look at it at full size on your screen. Is it straight? Is it sharp? Can you read details in the darker areas, or did it crush all the shadow into black?
If a photo is faded or has a color cast — a lot of old prints go orange or greenish with age — don't try to fully restore it in this step. That's a separate rabbit hole. For now just get a clean, accurate scan of what's there. We'll talk another time about how far to go with color correction, and honestly, I don't go very far. A faded photo looks like a faded photo. I'd rather it look like what it is than look like I ran it through six filters trying to make 1978 look like 2026.
The part where I get specific because I got burned once
Here's the thing. The first time I scanned a big batch of my grandmother's photos, I didn't write down my settings anywhere. Scanned maybe eighty photos over two afternoons, felt very productive, and then a few months later needed to scan another batch and had no idea what dpi I'd used, what file format, any of it. I had to go back and check individual file properties on the old scans just to match them up so the whole collection was consistent.
That was around the same time I started keeping a little journal for this stuff — actually the same week I'd been logging bread temperatures, so my notebook has "scanned photos at 600 dpi, TIFF, warm color cast on the 1970s batch" on one page and "375°F, 20 min, high altitude, still a little doughy in the middle" on the next. I still think that's funny. But now I check that notebook before every scanning session instead of relying on memory, and I've never had to redo a batch since.
Write your settings down somewhere. Doesn't have to be fancy. A sticky note on the scanner works.
One more thing on storage
Once you've got your scans, back them up the same way we talked about with the tape footage. Two places, at least. Scanned photos take almost no time to redo compared to a mini DV tape, but if the original photo has faded further or gotten damaged in the meantime, you can't rescan it back to how it looked today. Treat the scan file like it matters, because for some of these photos, it's going to end up being the sharpest version that exists anywhere.
Before next time: scan five to ten of your undated photos at 600 dpi, name the files with whatever you know, and bring them in on a drive. We'll start working on figuring out when they were actually taken.