A line in the 1862 work of Russian author Ivan Turgenev reads — “The drawing shows me at a glance, what would be spread over ten pages in a book.” By the 1920s, an American writer, Frederick Barnard, had paraphrased this as, “A picture is worth a thousand words” — a phrase much loved by photographers in the newspaper business, who use it to tease reporters about the relative impact of words and image.
The fact remains that a photograph is still the greatest way to preserve cherished memories and even in this digital age, many of us lovingly preserve old family albums from our younger days. But for how long?
Those sepia-tinted stills become dull and brittle with age and may eventually fade away in time. Which is why a new Google app may come as a blessing for those of us with piles of deteriorating, old photos. ‘PhotoScan’ uses the camera as a scanner and since most such cameras are multi-megapixel, the end result is almost as good as that offered by a costly flatbed scanner.
This is not like taking a photo of an old photo — never a good idea. PhotoScan automatically senses the edge of the photo and crops it clean; straightens crooked images, corrects for perspective and saves the image the right way up, no matter which way you scan. The app is available as a free Android and iOS app in the respective stores.
Having digitised your old photos, it makes sense to download another app — Google Photo which offers unlimited cloud storage to preserve them; some cool tools to enhance them by adjusting lighting, contrast, colour; a simple visual search tool that helps you locate a particular image and a way to share them quickly with friends and contacts.
Artify your photos
If sharing photos is something you do all the time, an Indian app will make it even easier. Vebbler is the brainchild of Sahil Bhagat who promises to make the process of sharing the photos you take with your phone, a cinch.
Recently, Vebbler has added a range of image art filters which allow you to artify your photos to give them a vintage, monochrome or sepia tone. Here’s the irony! You digitise and enhance your old sepia photos to preserve them. Then you give today’s photos a sepia tint for that vintage look. You can even add your reaction to a photo in quirky ways. More importantly, the app works with both portrait and landscape mode pictures, without cropping.
The business of shooting, scanning, saving and sharing photos was never this easy!
