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SCANNING PHOTOS
Digital cameras are now a normal part of everyday life.
Film and film cameras? They’ve pretty much gone the way of the “Dodo”. You’ll be lucky to find small selections of these items at places like Walmart or Best Buy.
But if you’re like me and have been shooting photographs for a long time, you probably have a large collection of prints. How can you bring these into the digital age?
Scan them.
Scanning photos is useful for a number of reasons. Perhaps the most important is creating a digital copy of your existing pictures. This is particularly important if you’ve lost track of the negatives.
Photos in digital form can be copied, transferred to an external storage device or CD, or used to create an online photo album. A digital photo archive also ensures that copies of important photos are available if the originals are destroyed.
Scanning photos also allows you to edit existing photos with imaging software, like Adobe Photoshop. Imaging software allows you to correct picture flaws such as red eye, contrast and lighting on your computer. You can even convert a color photo into grayscale (black and white) or sepia tones with editing software.
Which scanner?
Many different scanners are available, everything from stand-alone scanners to printer/scanner combinations. Each scanner comes with its own software to make use of its basic and unique functions.
Regardless of scanner options, all scanners work essentially the same way. After positioning the photo on the scanner’s glass plate, you open the scanner software and follow the directions. Most scanner software will show you a preview of the photo to be scanned.
Before scanning photos, however, you’ll need to make a few decisions about picture quality and image file types.
Scanner resolution
Scanner resolution determines the scanned photo’s image quality. Resolution is measured in dpi (dots per inch).
Smaller dpi settings result in lower picture resolution (not as highly defined) the files created will be correspondingly smaller. This will save space on your hard drive and the photos are more quickly uploaded to online albums or more easily sent as email attachments.
Here are typical dpi settings people use when scanning photos:
- 72 to 100 dpi: Although these settings provide lower quality resolution when scanning photos, they produce much smaller files when the image is scanned at 100 percent. Photos scanned at 72 to 100 dpi scans can be emailed without causing extremely long download times.
- 300 dpi: This dpi setting ideal if you’re planning to view or print copies at the same size of the original photo.
- 600 to 1,000 dpi: High dpi settings will produce extremely large files that take up a lot of memory and room on your hard drive. And, depending on your scanner, it will take longer for a scan at high resolutions. Use high dpi settings if you want to enlargements of the original photo without significantly compromising quality.
Image file formats
Another thing to decide on before scanning a photo is the type of file format that will be used in saving the images.
Here are the most common file formats for scanning pictures:
- Bitmaps (.bmp) is an image file format used especially on Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems.
- JPEG (.jpg) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital photography (image). The amount of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable trade-off between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality.
- Tagged Image File Format (.tif) is popular among Apple Macintosh owners, graphic artists, the publishing industry, and both amateur and professional photographers in general. These files are generally quite large compared to a JPG file of the same image size and quality.
- Graphics Interchange Format (.gif) was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has come into widespread usage on the Internet due to its wide support and portability.
The results of scanning photos will differ widely depending on which file formats and dpi resolution you select. Experiment with a scanner while scanning pictures. This will help give you some idea of which file formats and resolutions work best for individual pictures.
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