How to Scan Photographs

Do you want to add photographs to your letters, calendars or Web site? Use the guidelines below for the best results in scanning your photographs.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Scanners

1. Select a good-quality photograph. A poor-quality photograph results in a poor scan.

2. Insert the photograph into your scanner (for sheet-fed scanners) or place it onto the scanning surface (for flat-bed scanners).

3. Run a preview scan of the photograph to determine the scanning area (don't waste disk space scanning an entire page for a 3 by 5-inch photograph).

4. Resize the scanning area to fit the size of the photograph.

5. Set the scanning mode to color (or comparable setting) to include all of the colors in your photograph.

6. Set the resolution to 200 dpi or better for good quality in your scanned photographs.

7. Use the scanner features to increase brightness for underexposed photographs, decrease for overexposed photographs, or adjust colors.

8. Insert or place the photograph in the same position that you used for the preview scan, then scan it.

9. Save the image in a format (TIFF, PSD) that is understood by your graphic editor or other software program that will use your image.

Tips & Warnings

• To use the image on a Web site, use a graphic application (Photoshop, PaintShop) to convert the image to the JPEG or GIF format. (Web browsers only understand a few formats: GIF, JPEG, and sometimes BMP or PNG.)
• Scanned images take up a tremendous amount of disk space. Use compression programs (PKware, WinZip, StuffIt) to store images.

[legohead]

on 9/23/2008 If you have hundreds or thousands of photos, flatbed scanning will be a real time-waster. Besides, you have to find a good scanner, buy it, figure it out, get a feel for the different software and then sit scanning forever. For the price of the scanner alone, you could already get between 500-1,000 pictures scanned with a decent service. Local stores like Walgreens are too expensive for large quantities.

Try to find a local, specialized place so you don't have to ship your only copies out for scanning. For example, here in Chicago, there's a place called The Digital Convert ( http://www.TheDigitalConvert.com ) that has good prices and does photo albums as well. There are plenty of places available online if you don't mind shipping your photos, although few will do photo albums without gouging you.

on 3/17/2006 If you don't have a scanner and need to have a document in you computer, take a picture of it with your digital camera and then just upload it to your computer!

You can do it with old pictures, too. The resolution is excellent!