[bjc]

my ex sister in law has some of my dh family photos and she has agreed to let me scan them..there is a very sweet pro shot of my fil when he was a kid..but it is bigger than my scanner bed which is about 8.5 x 12....the photo is about 10 x 13 ...how should i scan it? and what do i do after to put it back together?

i have scanned it in 4 parts.... is this right? and what do i do to put it all back to make the whole pics?

any ideas? much appreciated

[April Showers]

You can scan it in parts and then put it back together in Photoshop. I'm kind of lazy that way, so when I"m doing a big photo, I put in in a nice light place without glare and take a photo of it with my 50 mm lens.

[PBarnes]

I love April's suggestion! If you aren't happy with putting the separate scans together or photographing it, another alternative is to find a company that has a large format or drum scanner. I had a large wedding certificate that I wanted scanned and I found a local digital procession company that scanned it for me and put in on a CD for $7. That was several years ago, but I thought the price was very reasonable.

[tinkerbell11]

I assume once you scan the four parts in Bobbie, you can stitch them together in your photoshop program?!

[Jenna]

Yup, if you want to reassemble it yourself you just make sure your scans slightly overlap so you can avoid bends. For instance, when you scan an item larger than the scanner bed it will often be lighter or darker at the edges that hang off the bed - you'll want to scan sections that overlap slightly so you can delete the discolored areas & merge them seamlessly. I have not had to do it with a photo, but I have scanned larger kid crafts (those adorable things they make in school every year that are waaaay too big to save). I just made sure I had a good scan of every part & then re-assembled them in pse. After I had cleaned them up & merged them I extracted them from the scanner background & saved as a layered file or as a png Just so you know, there is a photo merge or collage option, it is pretty limiting, I would just pull them into your editor, create a new document in whatever size you want the finished photo to be, & pull them into that doc to work with them. Hope that helps!

[AnnBK]

I've done this...and it's so much easier to take a digital photo of the picture. Just be sure you have good light. And if you don't get it right on the first try, you can always do another one.

[bjc]

i am thinking of seeing if staples or kinkos does larger scans and how much it costs...anyone know if they can scan this size

[AggieB]

If you were closer, I could scan it for you at work, but I would think one of those office places could do it.

[Cheri T]

Report back and let us know if you find a reasonably priced option. My local scrapbook store has a professional large bed scanner (I think I mentioned it in the other thread) but it's cost prohibitive to copy any but the most precious scrapbook pages. I'd love to have digital backups of all/most of my old 12 x 12 paper pages.

Good luck!

Another option: Take it to a local photofinisher and they can do a professional photo of the photo like April mentioned doing at home. I've had that done in the past for things I didn't want to try to copy myself and were too large to scan. They did a really really nice job. I wouldn't do that with a "send-out" type photofinisher though.

[SandiC.]

I did a large photo of my mom in 2 parts, brought them into PS and overlapped them onto one document and used a layer mask to blend them together. I had to do just a tiny bit of cropping to even up the edge, but it turned out very well. I've since reprinted it at 8x10 and it looks perfect.