kridlon Loc: massachusetts

A friend of mine had an album of prints (film) sitting in a damp area long enough for the pictures to become adhered to the plastic covering the pages. There is no way of seperating the pictures from the plastic as the print starts to peel off with the plastic. Is there a way these can be salvaged? The pictures are of her children when they were young and cannot be replaced. Possible to scan them then dowload to a disk and print again? Some of the pictures are actually damaged, and I wonder about glare from scanning. Does anyone have any suggestions. Are there companies that provide this service without having to remortgage my house to pay for it? Any help would be appreciated.

Frank T Loc: New York, NY

You can scan them with a flatbed although you may lose some resolution.
You could also try submerging the entire page in water as they were originally developed that way they should be able to be recovered.

kaz6756 Loc: Canarsie,Brooklyn, New York

I would submerge in the water. Hang dry like clothes on a clothes line they dry ok. when 100% dry then you can press them flat then scan. Don't put them face down on the paper towel. Good luck!

ncshutterbug

This situation was discussed a short while back with several solutions offered. You may find it in the search option. Until I get a chance to work on mine (same problem as yours) I have taken the plastic pages out of the deteriorated album with the photos still sealed in them and put each full album page in a scrapbook size photo sleeve and put them in the scrapbook for safekeeping. What a shame so many priceless family photos have been ruined by those things!

lovesphotos Loc: Colorado and Arizona

I have successfully scanned thru plastic with a flatbed. You may lose some resolution but it is so minimal that shouln't cause concern.
After they are copied by scanning, you can consider giving them a bath in distilled water to seperate and hang dry them. Any damaged areas may be saved by photoshopping as the final touch up.

crissx09 Loc: FL-USA

Yes Lovesphotos: I think your approach is the safest one and as you say Photoshop can make miracles ( O.K almost )

mrliberty

You can give this a try. I had some sucess with this.
Put them in the freezer for about an hour.Then take the out and immediately see it they will release off the plastic.

gtemple1 Loc: E. Olympia, WA

Frame it carefully, and take a picture of it. With a little PS cropping and adjustments, you'll be amazed how well it can turn out.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

You can scan them with the plastic pages still on. It's not perfect but better than losing them. I use an Epson Perfection Photo flatbed scanner. You should be able to get a brand new Epson Photo scanner that can scan whole pages at once for $150. You want a flatbed scanner with a door that lifts up to lay the photo page on glass not one that pulls a page through it with motorized wheels. My Epson will do up to 8X14 pages. The photo pages you have may be larger but you can likely make them fit and lay completely flat by cutting the pages out of the book with a razor knife and carefully trimming the edges. If the cardboard hangs out over the edges of the flatbed that's okay but you want the page to lay flat on the glass so there are no added abberrations.

If they are small photos like 3X5 or whatever, scanning the page with at least 900ppi resolution then you can enlarge the individual photos to as much as 11X14 in software with decent printing resolution.

You will need software to restore things about the photos like damage, fade, contrast, color loss, ragged edges, lines, cracks, dust spots, etc. I recommend Corel Paintshop Pro X5 Ultimate which I understand is available right now on Amazon right now for $44.99 with free shipping. I've been using it for years.

After restoring the individual photos and saving them on your hard drive, you can resize the files for printing and take them to a local CVS, Walgreen's, Rite-Aid, WalMart, or whatever for printing more than one set. Also store them from your hard drive onto a CD or DVD or both and put it in a safety deposit box.

This isn't going to be easy to accomplish and you have some learning to do, but it WILL be FAR cheaper than having it done.

Just get all the scanning done first so they don't get any worse - then you can spend time restoring them later.