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Many photographs are irreplaceable, so when protecting pictures, take a digital approach. Try this three-pronged solution to saving favorite photos.
- Scan important pictures now. Take steps now to get the most important pictures in your collection into digital form. Either scan your pictures yourself, or find a commercial imaging lab that can scan them for you. You can have a picture scanned to CD for about $1 an image, which is a small price to pay for peace of mind. Your scanned pictures provide a digital "negative" from which you can always create new prints in the future if needed.
- Work on copies, not originals. Always work on a copy of your original picture file. That way, if you mess up, you haven't ruined everything. You can just open the original image, make another copy, and start again. Of course, you should save the work-in-progress image often during an editing session to preserve your changes.
- Save in a lossless format. To preserve all original image data as you work on a digital picture, be sure to select a lossless format when you save the file. Your photo editor's native file format likely fits the bill, as does the TIFF format.
 | Two other common formats for digital images, JPEG and GIF, destroy some of the image data during the file-saving process. For that reason, you should save in JPEG or GIF only after you're completely done editing, and only if you want to use the picture for some purpose that requires one of these formats. |
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