First and foremost, consider the size of your scan. If you’re scanning photos to put on the internet, make the scan at 72 dpi, so that they are easily seen by others. If you’re going to scan photos for personal use or print, you will want to scan them in at 300 dpi to make sure you get great overall details. For large-size printing it is recommended to scan photos at 600 – 1200 dpi. However, these larger formats will take a lot of memory and ram to open, so be careful when selecting to use that size.

The second tip in how to scan photos properly is to increase the resolution of your scan when wanting to enlarge an image later. This can be done with the scanners settings put on high. If you’re planning to decrease the size of the image, set your scanners settings to low resolution, then proceed with the scan.

The final tip is in regards to restoring old photos. Old photos should be scanned at 300 dpi, and at high resolution. This will help get the best possible scan first. The second part to restoration is to have a image editing software. The most popular one of these is Adobe Photoshop. If you use this software you can repair some of the damaged or worn areas and then get them ready for print.