The recent day smartphones have been designed to store a few thousands of photographs which make it possible to recount years of our lives, all on a single device.
But what about the pictures that have been clicked using film cameras like the Polaroid and the age-old family portraits? The new PhotoScan app launched by Google for both Android and iPhone has been aimed at making it easier to preserve photos that have been clicked on films onto the smartphone.
All about the PhotoScan App
Google says that the PhotoScan app basically scans the paper photos using the camera of your smartphone in such a way that it eliminates the entire glare and the shadows to improve the overall quality of the photograph. The app will also automatically crop out the edges for example like the white border of a shot taken from a Polaroid and makes it appear clearer. The search giant has said that the app should also work with photos that have been treasured in frames and picture album also. The Product Manager of the new PhotoScan app has reportedly said that scanning of pictures by using traditional scanners takes some time, whereas services which involve third-party digitizing costs a lot of money, apart from having to part with the photos for a while, which involves risking loss and damage.
While a photo is being scanned, the PhotoScan app will ask you to line up a circle in the middle of the screen which has four dots that are located near the corners of the picture. The app will then take multiple specific images and will stitch them together, much like a panoramic shot. By doing this the glare which might occur while taking a single photo from a particular angle will be reduced.
The Demo of the App
The PhotoScan app worked really well during the demo which was shown using the regular printed photos. But scanning the Polaroid-shot pictures was trickier, probably due to their smaller size. In a few instances, a photo had to be scanned more than once so that it gets registered properly. The guiding dots were also moving around a bit as it was being tried to be lined up properly, making it a little difficult to scan the pictures quickly. Apart from removing the glare, the PhotoScan app also makes small adjustments to restore the color in the faded photographs and also to the aligned corners when there is a bend in the photo print.
The PhotoScan app generally does convey its promise of booting up the old photos with minimal glare. Apart from very few glitches, PhotoScan has managed to capture better-looking pictures of the Polaroids and it focuses more quickly than the stock camera app of an iPhone.
It is very obvious to expect that the PhotoScan app works with the Google Photos that allows the users to transfer all the newly scanned pictures on to their cloud library, which has an unlimited storage of photos whose resolution is up to 16 megapixels. The Google Photos will recognize the content of an image automatically which has been imported from the PhotoScan app. Google says that if the Google Photos of the user has tagged images of family members and friends, then the software will recognize all those people in the images automatically which have imported from PhotoScan, even if they look a bit different and younger in the scanned photo.
Google has not yet revealed what it has exactly planned for its PhotoScan app. However, the Product Lead of Google Photos has hinted that the search giant may look forward to focusing on improvising different ways of what the users can do with all those photos after they have been scanned. While the current version of the PhotoScan app essentially fixes the entire glare, the Product Lead of Google Photos has also said that the team is working on many other enhancements that are related to color as well.
Other Announcements
Many other announcements were made regarding the main Google Photos app which will be getting additional editing controls. There will be new filters for users who prefer automation and more coarse controls for the people who prefer manual editing. The newly added manual options include a “deep blue” shade to give the skies and water more color, without over-percolating the rest of the picture, and “skin tone” to adjust the colors only of the skins. Apart from these additions, the service will also automatically generate many additional varieties of video highlights created from the user’s collection of photos and videos, which will also be accompanied by background music. The service had previously organized the images only by taking into consideration the location and date. It had also recently started creating reels which allow following the growing stages of a kid. Lullaby, a new type of service will gather all the shots from a newborn’s initial days.