Keep Photo Scanning Costs Low
Dont be fooled into paying a photo scanner extra money to scan your typical photographs at higher than 300 dpi. Just because a scanning services offers photo scanning at 600 and 1200 dpi doesn’t mean that you are actually getting a higher quality scan. What it means is that you are paying extra money for something you are not really getting.
There might be a reason to scan at 600 or 1200 dpi if you were scanning from a negative because they are designed to to hold and transfer much more information than a photograph surface. So if you plan to enlarge images try scanning the negatives. Resolution that would require scanning a photo’s surface at higher than 300 dpi just isn’t there.
Wasting money is not the only reason to scan at 300 dpi. Photo scanning beyond 300 dpi produces huge files that slow down just about any use of your scans. Editing, viewing, and working with your files will be slower, and possibly much slower. And you will probably have to change the size of your scan smaller to use it for just about anything.
If you are a professional photographer or someone with a great deal of expertise in photography and photo scanning then you have already developed an understanding of what your particular needs are. If you are not well versed in photo scanning and are just looking to scan your typical photographs then you need to check out Wayne Fultons excellent article on this and other scanning topics at www.scantips.com.
Your photo scanner should save your photos as a high quality jpeg. High Quality denotes that the jpeg has been saved at a low compression with negligible quality loss. Higher compression means smaller files but also lower quality. You can always make your photos files smaller with free photo editing software.
Scanning services usually require that your photos arrive in stacks without regard to their orientation. After scanning, when your portrait photos need to be turned upright, make sure you dont rotate your master scans. Always leave your master scans intact and use copies of them to rotate. Any kind of manipulation recompresses your files and can cause quality loss.
Create copies of your master scans to use in any digital manipulation. If your photo scanning service offers manual or automatic photo enhancement make sure that they only manipulate copies of the master scans. Automatic enhancement programs can make your photos look better. But they dont make all of your photos look their best.
If your photo scanning service offers inexpensive automatic photo enhancement it might be wise to take advantage of it. Even though there are lots of good free photo editing software out there it can be extremely time consuming and boring. So let the photo scanner run your photos through the automatic enhancement program especially if this is a low cost service, and save the manual improvement for a few really special photographs. You can also purchase automatic enhancement software, but trying to figure which ones actually work can be a daunting task.
