Wedding album recovery attempt

This is how our 9 year old non-digital wedding album looks like.  I have been putting off getting the photos scanned because I knew it was not going to be an easy task. I was kidding the hubby, this is what we get for getting married during the stone age.  Well, digital photography coverages for weddings were already available back in 2001 but because of their being so few and scarce, the price was steep.  Digital photos back then weren’t as good as they are now anyway.

No. These pictures aren’t part of the wedding album, with that not so little guy in the photos, it’s not even our honeymoon album.  It’s Our Boracay Getaway 2009 printed via Arts Cow. For how much, you ask? For exactly $7.99 (approx. PhP360). It is what inspired me to tear those rusty pages off our wedding album and get to work and have them scanned.  I have been meaning to get this done for the longest time.  But the dirty job of having to get those pasted pictures off the browned and tarnished pages seemed to me was much of adaunting task.  When I received the above Boracay vacay album last week, I grabbed a hold of our antique looking wedding album and it looked worse than when I last saw it.

The paper and cardboards are not the only ones turning brown.  It has started to eat away the photos therein! There were already scattered purple spots all over. But yeah, nothing that Adobe can’t take care of. So I was off to work on this the whole day. Seriously.

I tried searching through the internet on how I could do this the easiest way possible. There were only a couple of suggestions that I found. But I was not too eager to risk on either one. The first suggestion is to soak the photos in tap water. Since I’m not sure of our tap water’s pH level, I might just ruin the photos altogether if I will do just that. The second suggestion was to put the photos inside the freezer! The same principle, eh? I’m not sure as well of the photo paper used by the photographer who covered our wedding so I figured I’ll do it my way. If you know of a better way to do it, feel free to share and leave a link. I do have a few photos that can make use of some recovering. 😉

This is how I went about the wedding album recovery task. I basically did the same thing for every single page, save for the photo embedded on the album cover. I still haven’t figured out how to butcher that out. Since the cardboards have already aged, they have become brittle and so I made sure I got the edges of the pictures safely off the cardboards before heading on the tearing spree. I also had to make sure that I don’t trim away carelessly because the pictures are pasted back to back. I made a couple, okay, more than a couple of boo-boos in the process. But again, nothing Adobe can’t fix.

I am not much of a scrapbook maker. I have no patience to get into the nitty-gritties of doing the non-digital ones. It takes so much time and that, I have not much of a luxury of.  So here is what I came up with at the end of the day. – Our Wedding Album Photo Book, which I’m still to receive in a week or so. What’s nice about this is I can always have something like this re-printed or play with template and designs, even add some embellishments here and there, now  that I have it uploaded in the Arts Cow gallery. I might even try getting an album done by one of our local photo book maker. They charge a lot pricier than Arts Cow. But when it comes to quality, I think Arts Cow can very well compete.

I also have Canon Philippines to thank for, for playing a major role in having this project done. The photos were scanned using the Canon Pixma MX347 All in One Printer that I got from the Canon Green Nation event held last month. The hubby and I were looking into buying a scanner a couple of months ago, but decided that we’ll put it off.  It’s good that we did. Because what we were looking to buy was just the basic one. Canon Pixma MX347 has WiFi to boot. Look Ma, no wires! A great replacement too for the fax machine that was killed by Ondoy.  Canon made it a lot easier for me to go about  my attempt to this wedding album recovery task. 😀

Wedding album recovery attempt

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