Remember, the last time when you had the whole family at your place to celebrate your child’s first birthday? Well, those are memorable moments full of love and memories and we all love to capture such moments for a lifetime.
Fortunately, today we got cameras with us all the time that enable us to capture all memorable events to be cherished for the lifetime. However, in all honesty, photographs don’t have much of a lifetime before the vibrancy of its colors starts to fade away. Moreover, even the digital raster images can be hard to get printed in large portraits as they blur out.
Well, there’s a way to eternalize such precious memories and use them as you want– by digitizing them!
If you haven’t yet heard about digitizing services, then, these are specialized services that are meant to transform raster (.jpg, .PDF, etc.) images into digital formats, thus making them eternal.
But how to digitize an image?
Well, here are some simple steps that you can follow to digitize an image:
Step 1: Scan the image
- The flatbed scanner is generally the most cost-effective means to digitize your image
- Adjust 300 – 600 DPI (Dots per inch) resolution to scan the images. While 300 DPI is enough to preserve the original image, using 600 DPI will help you to zoom or crop the images at the later stage without losing the clarity of the image
Step 2: Adjust Contrast and Colors
- Open your image (raster format) in the Photoshop: File → Open
- Now you will be able to see all the original layers of the image in the layers panel
- Leaving the original one alone, you can duplicate the layer for editing by left-clicking on the desired layer and choosing → Duplicate Layer
- Now, go to the Image tab → Adjustment Tab → Levels
- This will open a histogram which will enable you to adjust the contrast, brightness levels of the image
- Push the toggle to left and right to adjust the design and background as per your requirements
Step 3: Final Touches
- To remove any unwanted element/lines from the image you can use Brush tool from the Tool Bar.
- Set the color of the Brush to your desired color to remove any unwanted elements
- To retouch some of the design element, set the Brush color to the desired color
Step 4: Delete the background
- To remove the original background, hide the background layer by clicking on the “Eye” visible next to the layer’s name
- Make sure that there aren’t any unwanted shadows present on the edge of the image (this is common because of scanning).
- If you find any shadows at the edge use Brush tool to color those areas with White Color
- Now use Magic Wand present in the Toolbar and choose the background area you want to remove.
- Press the Delete Tab and keep repeating the steps from all other unwanted background areas
- You will see a checkered pattern representing the transparent background
Tip: you can set the contrasting background color to get the best print results by adding the new layer and filling the background using Paint Bucket. This will help you to get the best results in the printed version.
Step 5: Crop and Save the image
- You need to make sure that the digitizing design of your image fits the printed area later.
- You can crop the peripheral transparency using: Image → Trim → based on transparent pixels
- You can also resize your new digitizing image by resizing the image by Image → Image Size (Remember, the size of the image shouldn’t exceed 4000 x 4000 pixels)
- Once you are done, save your design as .png
Conclusion:
The process of digitizing an image detailed here is just one out of the many procedures that can be used for digitizing images. Remember, you can create the desired results by opting from other procedures as well and you should search out various digitizing processes and functions to edit and develop your design.
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