I’m Linda Sattgast and I just wanted to share with you the best way to scan vintage deckle-edged photos because let’s face it—the deckle edges are part of the story. They were popular in the early to mid 20th century so a lot of my early photos have deckle edges.

Online scanning companies remove the deckle edges and scanners that feed your photos through a fast scanner chop part of the edges off, so if you want to retain those wonderful edges here’s how to do it using using a flatbed scanner.

Wipe the dust off your SCANNER AND PHOTOS and place your photos face down on the scanner bed with plenty of room between each photo. The inside of the scanner lid is white, just like the deckle edges so put something black over the photos to make white photo edges stand out from the background. My favorite is a piece of black felt cloth. It works great for two reasons—it’s often heavier than paper, especially if you buy a heavy grade of felt, and it absorbs the scanner light rather than reflecting it which gives you a nice dark background—and it’s just easier to work with than paper in my opinion. The only negative for felt is that it does attract dust or hair so keep it in a plastic bag when you’re not using it.

You can find felt at a fabric store and cut out a piece that’s just big enough to hang over the edges of your scanner.

There’s one problem with heritage photos—They’re notorious for being curved or warped from sitting around in boxes so they tend to spring up or move around when you put something over them—whether it’s a scanner lid or a piece of paper or cloth. To make sure the photos are straight, place one hand firmly, like an anchor, on the felt cloth right in the middle. Then lift the cloth edges one side at a time to straighten any crooked photos. Cover them up again before slowly and carefully lifting your hand off the cloth.

When you lower the scanner lid you’ll also need to go slowly and carefully and gently place it down because if you’re too fast or too hard the photos are most likely going to move.

Here’s one of my finished scans—and here’s a page in my book where I used deckle photos selected from a scan.

I used to select each photo from the background by hand in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements but I now have a Photoshop ACTION that does it for me with the click of a mouse—and it works just as well in Photoshop Elements.

So when it comes to deckle edged photos you can have your cake and eat it too!