Google has unveiled a new app which gives anyone the ability to ‘scan’ a high-resolution picture of their old photos and save them digitally.
PhotoScan is a free app for iOS and Android, it’s able to detect edges, straighten them and then rotate it to the correct orientation.
It’s also able to remove the glare that comes from capturing those old glossy photos.
How does it do this? It uses something incredibly clever called computational photography.
A person takes one initial photo and then four more around the edges of each corner, the app then uses some incredibly complex computing to then stitch them all together taking only the best elements from each photo and combining them.
There’s a great explanation here:
For those who are short on time however here’s the tldr:
We already use computational photography without even realising it. Panorama photos work by stitching together multiple photos creating one seamless image.
By taking five pictures the photo captures five different glare angles, it’ll then use all five of them to completely remove the glare.
Once that’s done it creates reference points within the photos and uses them to match all five images together without any blur.
The result is your old family photo captured perfectly in high-definition.
