DIY Photo Scanning Tips-Part 1:
Scanner Settings
Of course, we would like to make you aware of the convenience of using
Home Movie Depot's photo scanning service (low domestic pricing with no
minimums), but there are so many all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/faxes that it's
very tempting to scan your own photos, especially if you only have a few you
want digitized.
First, keep in mind that scanning with a home scanner is a
very time consuming process. Each print
has to be scanned, titled, and saved individually. It's best to set aside ample time to work on
your scanning project. In many cases,
that time is several days.
Second, if you do decide to scan photos to DVD at home
(whether you want to do a few or a lot), there are a few things that will make
the process a lot easier, produce much better quality scans, and hopefully be
less stressful.
Photo Scanning Limitations and Safety
A scanner can do very little to improve the quality of your
images and typically captures exactly what is on the print, so you will want to
make sure that there is no dust, hair, or oil on your print before you place it
on the scan bed.
You should also be extremely careful anytime you place
something on the scanbed, as a scratch on the glass will appear on any future
scans in that area.
Purpose for the Scan
As any do it yourself photo scanning articles will suggest, your
scanner settings should be guided by what you want to do with your digital photos. The most commonly discussed issue is dpi (dots
per inch) settings, but your color settings (bit settings) can also come
into play.
The first thing you will need to do is open your photo scanning
software. Place the photo on the scan
bed and hit 'scan' or 'preview'. The photo
scanning software program should bring up a picture of the entire scan bed,
including your photo. From here there
are a variety of options that affect the digital image that the photo scanner
produces.
Setting the Crop box
The crop box tells the photo scanner where to scan. Some will auto-adjust around your photos,
while others will need to be set manually.
If it is not set, the scanner will think you want to scan the entire
scan bed, and your photo will only be a fraction of the digital picture.
You can also use the crop box to cutout portions of the
photo that you do not want.
Resolution
For our photo scanning service, we stick to either 300 dpi
or 600 dpi resolution, so that the quality is high enough that you can use them for
many different projects. Much smaller images are commonly used for
emailing and posting on the internet (it is easy to resize your photos); of
course, internet-sized pictures are much lower quality, but the loading time is
much shorter.
We choose 300 dpi and 600 dpi as our scan resolutions,
because a scanned image is similar to a getting a hair cut: you can always trim
some more off, but you can't bring it back once it is gone. 300 dpi is our lowest resolution, because it
is slightly above the recommended mark for quality same-size prints.
For web posting, many sites will actually trim the image for
you when you upload it, or you can use a web application or program to resize
your images for easier viewing.
Image resolution does affect both the load and scan time of
your photo scanning project. Larger
files take more time to scan and load, but if you are going to take the action to preserve your photos through
digital photo scanning, it is beneficial to scan at a high resolution.
Color Settings
Most photo scanning programs allow you to set the number of
colors that will be detected, which is measured in bits. Basically, the higher the bit setting, the
more different colors the scanner will detect and store. In many cases, 8 bit is fine, but for our
photo scanning service we leave the settings at 48 bit, per the above hair cut
analogy. If your photos have any dark or blownout
areas, you will get a much better photo scan from a higher bit photo scanner
setting because the photo scanner will be able to detect many more shades of white,
gray, and everything in between, resulting in more detail in your digitized
photo.
Dust removal and other automatic image enhancement
In many cases, dust removal can help to clean up your image,
but such tools are not perfect by any means. The problem is that you are telling a computer program, 'Find the dust and replace it with the
background color' so the scan program has to search for things it perceives as
being dust. Many scan programs allow you
to adjust the level of dust removal, and if you experiment with this, you may
find that the higher settings remove all the dust, but also removes eyebrows,
buttons off shirts, hair, leaves, and limbs on trees.
We haveve already experimented heavily with our scanner settings
to determine that sweet spot for the most dust removal without losing anything
from the actual image. If you want to
use auto cleaning features, you will need to do the same.
There are usually a number of other settings specific to
certain scan programs that can either improve or diminish the quality of your
scanned image. One of the most notable
is the compression setting (the more compression, the lower the quality and the
smaller the file).
Although it is possible to adjust your scanner settings to
produce certain effects in your digitized image, it is usually recommended to
capture the image and modify it in external photo editing software.
If you haven't gotten started, we can help! Get those family pictures scanned to DVD so you can start enjoying them again.
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