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| Family Photo Archive |
Today I decided to take some of my treasured family photos and create borders and mats for them using my
Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner
I decided to tackle this project using two different methods. First I chose a photo and laid it on a pattern that I like.
My patterns came from my furniture (sofa, chair), my floors (tiles, hardwood), wallpaper and other spots in my house.
Below are examples of putting a photo on a pattern that I like, then taking the lid off my
Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner, turning it upside down to scan and pressing the green button.
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| Photo on Chair |
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| Photo on floor tile |
Next I transferred the scans to my computer using the
Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner USB adaptor. Here are a few of the actual scans. One very important thing to remember is that if your original photo is crooked (as is my photo of my Grandmother's brother in WW1 uniform) your final scan will not look very good. So what you see here is for example only. I will trim the edges of that photo to make it perfect and redo the scan against the pattern.
You will also find that you need to crop your scan to create a border that is symmetrical as it's difficult to accomplish in the original layout of photo and background
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| Scan before cropping |
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| Photo needs trimming |
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| Scan after cropping |
You can see that it is fairly easy to create a nice mat and border effect for your photos. These can then be printed on a good quality laser printer or they can be put in a digital photo album or you could use a service such as Shutterfly to create a lovely photo book for family.
The second way I will create mats and borders is to scan various patterns around my home and in nature. Then I'll import those into my photo editing software and layer the original photo (which I've scanned using my FlipPal) on top.
Here are some of the patterns I've scanned in preparation for layering photos with backgrounds. I used a tile floor, a lace tablecloth, my kitchen counter and fabric on furniture.
I'm excited about using my
Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner to finish creating a unique digital scrapbook of my family photos with my own borders.
Great idea! I will certainly have to try that. The Flip-Pal is such a fun tool.
ReplyDeleteBret, it really works great. I know you can do a much better job than I did here but my excuse is that this blog post was simply to illustrate the idea hubs and I had for creating these borders!
ReplyDeleteThis is really great! We added this to Flip-Pal's Pinterest page :-)
ReplyDeletehttp://pinterest.com/flippal/favorite-genealogy-blogs/
Are you on Pinterest?
-Shantel
I'm on Pinterest at
ReplyDeletehttp://pinterest.com/lorinems/
I just followed your boards :-)
Thanks Lorine. I am doing demos of Flip-Pal for the Australian distributor, I'll be sharing this info.
ReplyDeleteOne Flip-Pal added to my "must have" list! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI would never have thought of this!!! This is a wonderful idea - thanks for sharing it with us...
ReplyDeleteThis is a wonderful idea! I would never have thought of this. Thanks for sharing it with the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteFantastic idea Lorine!
ReplyDeleteWhat a fantastic idea! Thank you so much for sharing it! I love my Flip-Pal!
ReplyDeleteNever thought of doing this "bordering" trick before, even though I had done it accidentally in the past! (Such a dummy!) Now I will be scouring my house for awesome background patterns.
ReplyDeleteWhen I scan with the Flip Pal and bring it over to my computer, it has a black background that I am trying to get rid of. Especially if it is a small size photo. This might be the solution. I am using a free program called IrfanView to crop. Any ideas?
ReplyDeleteGenJoan - you can crop your photo once you import to your computer.
ReplyDeleteYou can do that in Irfanview but I prefer doing it in Picasa (a free download) It is SO easy and fast in Picasa.
You can also straighten it if it was scanned a bit crooked!
Lorine