The holidays seem to give people the little push they need to start digitizing their photos. I hear it every season – “This is the year we are finally going to get all the old photos on the big TV and go through them!” and then it comes time to decide how, and the idea falls flat.
The top notch way would be with a photo scanner, and if you have stacks and stacks of photos, this is the recommended option. Photo scanners aren’t always cheap, and spending a little more money and time researching will pay off in the long run. But, if you aren’t in the financial situation to spend a couple hundred bucks on a devoted photo scanner, Google has you covered.
Google announced their new app, PhotoScan, intended for ease and quality. If you have ever tried to take a photo of a photo with your smartphone camera application, you know the quality of the picture is less than great. It is pretty obvious by the glare that you took a photo of a photo, and the edges are almost never straight. Sending your photos off for a company to digitize is an option as well, but the cost associated and the time frame are not ideal. Not to mention most do not want to send their original photos and have to get copies made anyway! What a mess!
The Google PhotoScan app gives a better solution, designed purely for photo capturing. The difference is that loads of scanning applications exist, but these are designed for documents with small print, flat color, and no glare. PhotoScan is designed for photos. It works by first walking you through the steps to take four overlapping photos of the print photo. It superimposes four dots on your smartphone screen and has you move your phone around to draw a circle around each dot. After which the application detects edges and straightens each of the four photos together, removes the glare, and finalizes the result. You are left with a perfect photo of a photo!
The application is essentially taking each of the four photos and stacking them on top of one another. In the process it removes the bright white pixels caused by glare and even adds image correction to color and clarity. Photos can be saved to the photo storage on your phone, or Google Photos offers unlimited storage with easy search, organization, and share features.
Check it out this holiday season!!
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