Digital Photography Tutorial - More Photo Scanning Service Recommendations - Computers


Digital Photography Tutorial - More Photo Scanning Service Recommendations   by Tabitha W Mwendo

in Computers    (submitted 2011-05-08)

Digital Photography Tutorial - If you are not gonna enlarge your digital scans then do not pay to have them scanned at a higher resolution than 300 dpi. Even if you will be enlarging them, you are most likely wasting your money. 600 and 1200 dpi scanning services don't mean better scans, however they do mean higher prices. For your typical photos, 300 dpi is the wisest choice.

Many people have not considered the fact that a photograph's surface wasn't made to reproduce an image like a negative is. So scanning a negative to enlarge a photograph is sensible, however a photo's surface does not have enough resolution. Photo scanning typical photographs at higher than 300 dpi has a downside other than the additional cost. Higher resolutions produce bigger files and that indicates slower loading and bigger file storage requirements. The majority of the uses that people scan their ordinary photos for need smaller files and that means resizing your 600 and 1200 dpi files smaller. That's time consuming and wasteful.

If you are a professional photographer or someone with quite a lot of expertise in photography and photo scanning you then have already developed an understanding of what your certain 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 scantips.com

Make certain that your scanned photos are saved as a high quality jpeg. Pictures saved in a jpeg format are compressed to lower the file size. High compression causes the jpeg to lose bits of information which are gone forever. High quality jpegs have very low compression and lose hardly any.

Don't rotate your original scans. When you send your photos in to be scanned, they're in a stack usually without consideration as to whether they are in portrait or landscape mode. Simply because rotating your jpeg scans recompresses them and you can lose bits of information and suffer reduced image quality. Make sure you make copies of your original master scans to rotate.

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 pictures look better. But they don't make all your pictures look their best.

You will find all kinds of software both manual and automatic available to edit your photo scans. The manual editing software offers you complete control and unlimited do-overs. The automatic versions do a lot of good to most of your pictures and a few good to the rest. Manual enhancement ought to most likely just be used for those really special photographs or else you will be bored silly. Trying to choose an automatic enhancement software could be difficult because it takes certain experimentation to discover which ones really work. If your photo scanning service provides affordable automatic enhancement, that may be your best bet.