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.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

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.

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