Recently we’ve come across some awesome paintings created from vintage photographs. Creating what he calls “piggyback art”, Alex Gross has taken a hobby of transforming old photos and artworks into new works by adding certain elements to the original. He’s compiled a collection of works he calls the “Heroes, Villains and Monsters” series.

This would be great to do from home once you scan old photos to your computer. If you’re family has tons of old photos and vintage items, you could create similar works of art for your family! To see more cool paintings, check out the rest of them here.

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Looking for a place to scan your collection of old family photos? Our office in Denver is equipped with high quality flatbed scanners and photo scanning equipment to convert your photographs into digital images that you can keep and share for a lifetime.

If you’re planning on getting your collection of photos scanned, the whole process is actually easier than you’d think. The hardest part of the project is usually the initial organization stage. If you have a mountain of photos, you may not want to get ALL of them scanned, or perhaps you’d like to scan batches at a time. Once the organization is complete, however, the hard work is done, and they are ready to be scanned. Check the map below for easy directions to our office.

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First, you’ll simply drop on by our store with your photos by either appointment or walk-in. One of our technicians (usually the one who will be working on your order) will ask a few basic questions to help guide you through the order taking process and come up with an initial estimate. Once the specifications have been decided, the technician will give you a completion date, and your copy of the estimate.

Here are some of the advantages of choosing DVD Your Memories for your photo scanning in Denver:

All your images are scanned and transferred to our 100-year archival DVDs. If you choose to place your images on one of our DVDs, we’ll place everything on our Taiyo-Yuden DVDs rated to last up to 100 years.

We don’t use document scanners to scan your photos. We only use high quality flat-bed scanners to digitize your photos.

All scans are performed in-house. We never outsource any of your media. All of your photos will be scanned here at our local office. In addition to photos, all of your media will be transferred at the location that you dropped your images off at.

We’ll make sure that each and every one of your images are cropped and rotated correctly. We even have a second technician check over your order prior to finalizing to make sure it is 100% accurate, start to finish.

Free custom folder and file naming, meaning that we will organize and name your photos to your specifications. For more details, check out our photo scanning page.

If you opt to place your photo scanning order onto one of our DVDs, you can title the disc however you’d like!

Many Rare formats supported such as photo albums and large format photos. In addition, we also support many rare and obsolete formats for slide scanning and negative scanning.

Contact sheets allow you to view your collection of images quickly in an indexed format. All of your images will be nicely indexed and placed into a custom binder with your images.

Slideshow creation services are available for Denver photo scanning orders that need a little more flair or touch. You can even sit down with our in-house editor to create something truly fantastic. The options are limitless!

Click for more information about Denver Photo Scanning

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Looking for a place to scan your collection of old family photos? Our office in Los Angeles is equipped with state-of-the-art photo scanning equipment to transform your photos into digital images that you can cherish for a lifetime. The whole process is even easier than you think!

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First, you’ll simply drop on by our store with your photos by either appointment or walk-in. One of our technicians (usually the one who will be working on your order) will ask a few basic questions to help guide you through the order taking process and come up with an initial estimate. Once the specifications have been decided, the technician will give you a completion date, and your copy of the estimate.

Here are some of the advantages of choosing DVD Your Memories for your photo scanning in Los Angeles:

All your images are scanned and transferred to 100-year archival DVDs. If you choose to place your images on one of our DVDs, we’ll place everything on our Taiyo-Yuden DVDs rated to last up to 100 years.

We don’t use document scanners to scan your photos. We only use high quality flat-bed scanners to digitize your photos.

All scans are performed in-house. We never outsource any of your media. All of your photos will be scanned here at our local office. In addition to photos, all of your media will be transferred at the location that you dropped your images off at.

We’ll make sure that each and every one of your images are cropped and rotated correctly. We even have a second technician check over your order prior to finalizing to make sure it is 100% accurate, start to finish.

Free custom folder and file naming, meaning that we will organize and name your photos to your specifications. For more details, check out our photo scanning page.

If you opt to place your photo scanning order onto one of our DVDs, you can title the disc however you’d like!

Many Rare formats supported such as photo albums and large format photos. In addition, we also support many rare and obsolete formats for slide scanning and negative scanning.

Contact sheets allow you to view your collection of images quickly in an indexed format. For a small fee, we can include contact sheets with your order to help you quickly catelog and organize your images.

Slideshow creation services are available for photo scanning orders that need a little more flair or touch. You can even sit down with our in-house editor to create something truly fantastic. The options are limitless!

Click for more information about Los Angeles Photo Scanning

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Scan your photos from home using a new iPhone app called Shoebox. This new app was developed for iPhone users looking for a quick and easy way to scan photos or documents from their own home, using only a phone! Once scanned it’s then very easy to upload to your favorite photo sharing sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Although you won’t get the same quality of actual dedicated flat-bed photo scanning, you can get surprisingly crisp images, especially if you own a later version iPhone such as the 4 or 4s models. Using this free app, which will soon also be available on Android and other mobile platforms, you can scan 4×6 photos with a DPI of up to 550.

Shoebox also incorporates cropping and straightening as it auto-detects the edges of a photo. Users who already caption and tag photos taken on mobile phones, Shoebox users can do the same with these scans. The photos are then automatically uploaded to the website 1000memories, where it can be organized and shared with friends and family.

Read more about it here!

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When trying to load images on your Pandigital photo frame, sometimes it will tell you that your image is unsupported, even though it loads fine and appears to be the same as the rest of your images that work perfectly.

The “not supported format” issue is usually caused by the way the image was originally saved onto your computer. We have found that if you save your images as “progressive” it will cause your images to not be supported by the pandigital photo frame. Depending on the program you use, you’ll need to make sure that your images are saved as “baseline” or “optimized” and not saved as “progressive”.

There are some other programs that also have this feature, so you’ll need to be sure that you select the right options when it comes time to save your images. This error happens a lot when performing photo scanning or slide scanning, or doing batch processing of lots of images.

If your images are coming up as an unsupported format, you can use a nifty program called IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com/) to determine what they were saved as.

If your unsupported images are showing up as “progressive” when viewed through IfanView, here are the steps you’ll need to do to fix it.

1. If you own Photoshop, there is an easy fix for this detailed below.

To fix your images using Photoshop, you’ll need to save them as optimized images, making sure to uncheck the box for progressive. Check the screenshot below.

2. If you don’t own Photoshop, there is an alternative you can use called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). There is a free download for GIMP at http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

To fix your images with Gimp, you’ll also need to save them as optimized images, making sure to uncheck the box for progressive. Check the screenshot below.

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October is a great month for taking pictures. Autumn has arrived to bring us cooler weather and beautiful landscapes across the country, a great combination for photographs! Today we’ll be giving you a few tips for generating the most perfect photographs on this extra spooky day — Halloween!

Taking the perfect halloween picture can, in fact, be somewhat complicated for the amateur photographer. Although it’s pretty easy to get the image you want in your shot, there are a few tweaks and tips you should abide by to make the most out of your Halloween pictures. After all, it only happens once a year!

For starters, you might want to check out our earlier post about three easy tips to taking a great photograph here: http://www.dvdyourmemories.com/blog/tips-great-photographs/

Using these three tips, also known as the NYI guidelines, you’ll be on the right track to taking great photos in no time
Know your subject
Draw attention to your subject
Simplify your image

However, for special times like this, the Three Guidelines are only part of the story on how to get great Halloween photographs. The second key is to capture the “spirit” of Halloween. The spirit of Halloween can incorporate many things such as fantasy, fear, paranormal, and eerie. How can we capture this “spirit” in our Halloween photographs? Not surprisingly, the best way is actually using the proper lighting. Since nighttime ghouls are so central to the holiday, this often means shooting at night or in dim light to capture that extra ghoulish effect.

You should also avoid using your flash on Halloween, it tends to focus less on the dark and mysterious with a huge flash of light all over the image. For halloween you should be using ambient lighting, placed in different spots for the best effect.

For photographing trick or treaters or halloween costumes

Halloween is very popular in America just for the fact that it’s the one day of the year where you can dress ass whatever you want! Costume sales are continually on the rise which means more and more opportunities to take wonderfully scary photographs! When capturing your children or guests in their Halloween costumes, first decide what the best part of the costume is — whether that be the whole costume or just the mask — and then fill the frame with what you think is the most important aspect of the costume.

You should also make sure to take a photo of your subject with their mask off as well! That way in the future there is no question of the identity behind the mask. Don’t forget to try being higher and lower than your subject to make the image seem a little more scary.

Don’t forget that Halloween is also the perfect time for your halloween slide scanning, photo scanning, and negative scanning projects! Convert your old Halloween pictures to digital images on DVD and upload them to the internet to share with friends!

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Next time you scan your slides, negatives, and photos, watch for something called JPEG “compression” level. Don’t worry, all this will make sense soon.

For now, just know that your scanner’s default JPEG settings are probably not set right. This means your scans will lose some pixel quality. I will show you where to adjust the JPEG settings so you don’t lose any quality when saving your scans.

But first, you need to know two things about JPEG image files. Once you know this stuff, then you’ll be able to control the quality of your JPEG files.

1. JPEG Files Are Compressed

Professional photographers and graphic designers like to use TIFF image files. TIFFs are huge. Sometimes they’re 500 MB in file size. TIFFs are great because they have a lot of digital data. And the more data they have, the more a person can manipulate and edit that digital image.

But, for you and I, TIFFs are over-kill. Most of this digital data is redundant, and doesn’t add to the overall quality of your image.

Somebody figured out a way to remove all this useless data and maintain quality, using a compression method. Your TIFF file is sized down from 500 MB to 5 MB — but without losing any picture quality.

So what you end up with is a high-quality digital image, but at a file size that won’t clog up your computer space or take forever to upload.

2. You Can Control JPEG Compression

When the image scanning is completed and when you save your slides, negative, and photos as JPEGs, your scanner will give you the option to adjust how much your file is compressed.

Except the problem is, maybe like my scanner, your scanner’s default compression is set too high. The higher compressed your JPEG, the less detail you’ll see. It doesn’t matter if you scanned your slide at 4000 DPI. If you save that slide scan at a highly compressed JPEG, it will take away some detail.

Where Can You Change Your JPEG Compression Level When Scanning

Now that you know that you have the option to change the JPEG’s compression, you’ll need to read your scanner’s manual to find this option. With my scanner, the option to change JPEG compression comes up at the last step — when I’m about to save my scan. There’s an “JPEG Option” box I click to adjust the level. Once I have this set, I don’t have to touch it anymore.

My scanner’s default compression level is 6 out of 10. That’s too high. It gives me a small file size. But who cares. I want quality pixels. So I changed my compression to 1 out of 10. This will ensure that all my scans will be the highest JPEG quality possible.

Click here to read more

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Tip one: Know your subject

Although it might be an obvious step, a lot of people don’t seem to think about this before taking photos. You should always determine what the subject of the photo is going to be prior to taking it. If you don’t, you end up taking pictures of random things and situations, and they don’t always look so good. You should also try to make the picture you capture focus on the subject.

Sometimes the picture you capture doesn’t express what you saw in the viewfinder. Let’s say you took a picture of Billy playing in the front yard. When you get the prints back and get ready for photo scanning, you still see Billy there, but you also see the bumper of your car, half a bush, a trashcan, and the neighbor’s broken gate. This is all a part of knowing what your subject is. The viewer of your image should not struggle to figure out exactly what the photo is supposed to be of.

Tip two: Draw attention to your subject

Now that we have established the subject of the photo, it’s time to draw attention to your subject. The easiest way to do this is to fill the frame with your subject. This technique obviously draws attention to your subject, because it’s the only one in the photo! The neat thing is that this trick will work with any camera at any time. Just fill up the viewfinder and snap away. So remember to draw attention to your subject whenever you look in the viewfinder. You can even ask yourself: “Does the image I see draw attention to my subject?” and ask, “Do I see anything in the frame that might distract the eye of the viewer from my subject?”

Tip three: Simplify your image

Now that the first two steps have been applied, it’s now time for the third, and sometimes most effective tip. You want to keep your images simple, especially if focusing on a single subject. Before taking the photo, look through the viewfinder and look for any objects that might be distracting or might draw attention away from the subject. This mostly applies to objects along the edges of the frame that might lead viewers eyes away from the subject. If you notice something, get rid of it! This can be done by moving the object out of the range of view. If it’s not movable, try moving your camera! Create different angles and try different areas to get that beautiful shot. If those two tricks don’t work out, then you could always try to move your subject.

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Organizing your photo collection can seem like a daunting task. Especially if faced with thousands upon thousands of images taken over the years. Luckily, there are several computer programs that can help do this for us, with relative ease. Digital photo organizers have been around for a while, and really started to gain popularity within the last couple years, especially with people who are now going through their older media and scanning slides, negatives and old photos.

Picasa

Picasa is a simple, yet effective photo manager. Originally developed by Idealab in 2002, it was purchased shortly after by Google in 2004. Since then, it’s grown as a premier photo manager with a large user base. With Picasa, it’s possible to organize and search for your photos in a variety of different ways. For starters, Picasa utilizes a folder manager, which allows you to import photos from all around your computer into Picasa, without moving the original photos out of their existing directories. You can of course do the standard such as name the photos individually, place them into folders, as well as new ways of photo sorting such as facial recognition, keyword tags, geotagging, and photo collections. Picasa is free download as well, making it a top choice for many people worldwide.

Picasa also has a built in image editor called Pic Nic, which will allow you to make edits to your photos for common ailments such as color adjustments, contrast, red-eye fix, and cropping.

iPhoto

For Mac users, iPhoto will be a familiar program, as it’s bundled software included with every new Mac purchase. iPhoto is a great photo organizational tool, with many different appealing features. A lot of the magic happens behind the scenes, as iPhoto will use advanced techniques to store your photos using an automatic import tool. Like Picasa, iPhoto has a variety of different image manipulation and editing features designed to enhance your existing collection. The overall usability, look, and it’s seamless integration into existing apple products and software make it a top pick for Mac users.

Photo organizers are great for when you first begin scanning your photos to your computer, and need a neat way to view them at any time. Try one out!

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Proper photo scanning equipment isn’t cheap, so it’s best to be as prepared as possible before you make your purchasing decision. Below is an excerpt from about.com which details some of the top photo scanners on the market today.

1. Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner

This Epson photo scanner gives great value for under $200. It comes with great bundled software (including Adobe Photoshop Elements) and holders for slides and negatives. The holders feel a bit flimsy and the automatic document feeder is extra, but otherwise this did a great job of digitizing some old negatives and photographs, and helping me get them looking new again. With a little more paper documentation, this Epson photo scanner would be even better, but it’s still a great deal.

2. Pandigital PhotoLink One-Touch Photo Scanner

The Pandigital Photolink One-Touch Photo Scanner is small, affordable, and did a decent job in scanning photos (and did it quickly too). It may not be the choice of professional photographers, and it doesn’t scan negatives or slides, but for the home user looking to get that box of photos organized, this is a good deal.

3. Epson Perfection V700 Photo Scanner

This pricey Epson photo scanner uses a Dual Lens System, where the scanner automatically chooses from two lenses to give the best scan resolution. It also features easy ways to digitally remove dust and scratches from film to make retouching simpler (and comes with additional image-editing software). With 48-bit color depth, there’s no question that you’ll get rich images. The unit can hold 12 35-mm slides or 24 35-mm film strips. Epson’s suggested retail price is $549.99, and for that price it’s not surprising that it makes an effort to provide some all-purpose scanning capability, with features like optical character recognition. Epson photo scanners typically get great reviews, so it may be worth the investment.

Click here to read the full article…

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