Warbird Information Exchange

When scanning a picture, what give the best quality scan i.e. jpeg, bmp, tif, etc.? Thanks.

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"Everyone wants to live here (New Jersey), evidenced by the fact that it has the highest population per capita in the U.S..."

TIFF, but you will get very big files.
JPEG uses lossy data compression so you will loose quality. But it is good enough for most people.

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http://www.yakkes.com Yakkes Foundation, Yak-52

Scott,

It will depend on what you want to do with the scans.

I try to scan at the highest possible resolution and save the files as .tiff

While this creates hughe files, disk storage is not as expensive as it used to be, and I have purchased a couple of removable hard drives of 80gigs each, and these have been very handy to store not only my scans, but also the digital photos I have been shooting recently.

Whenever I need to publish a photo, I make a copy of the original, and then mess with the copy, so that if I happen to screw things up, the original remains untouched.

For web publishing, a resolution of 100dpi should do. This will not only give you a sharp photo, but will also load fast in most computers.

Remember to keep the size of the image small, let's say around 800 by 600 pixels or so (dimensions can be kept proportional by the image manipulation software that you use).

A while back, someone was kind enough to give me a "cheat-sheet" on how to use photoshop elements to tweak photos for web publication, and if you are interested, I will be glad to share this little document with you.

Saludos,

Tulio

Bmp will give you just as good results as tiff, but the file size will be even bigger. Those are the commonly available options. Tiff is the choice of most because it produces the smallest non-lossy files. Avoid jpg is pretty much the main rule to remember.

Scan to 16-bit files if you can. This will double the file size over 8-bit, and you may have to convert to 8-bit for editing and web publishing, but at least you will have the richer files archived for future use.

August

Thanks for the tips. I have a brand new HP C5100 scanner and I'm not impressed with the quality of the scans I'm getting from the pictures I've been running through it. Doesn't seem to matter what dpi or methed (i.e. jpeg, tif, bmp) I use. I'm just wondering if that's just the nature of scanning pictures into a computer. When I scan a picture and re-print it as a photograph, it does a great job.

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"Everyone wants to live here (New Jersey), evidenced by the fact that it has the highest population per capita in the U.S..."

If you are using the same device to scan and reprint as you are to scan into the computer, the difference you're noticing is probably some post-processing that the device applies to the pictures before printing. The input into the computer would be the same as what the device is using for the printing. When you get skilled with post-processing the image in Photoshop (or whatever), which any scanned print needs, you should be able to get a scan that looks just as good as those re-prints. Or better.

August

I'd be very interested in you're "cheat sheet" Thanks!

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"Everyone wants to live here (New Jersey), evidenced by the fact that it has the highest population per capita in the U.S..."

Hi

I use the CanoScan 8400F

I usually scan my photos, slides or negs at high resolution in .tiff mode -


Depending on the quality of the original, I normally use the following settings

small size photos (up to 4 inch) I scan at 800 - 1600 dpi, medium size photos I run at 400 - 800dpi, larger ones (8x10's) at 300 - 400 dpi.
For details (like data-blocks on a/c, noseart, etc.) I even go to 3200 dpi.

Slides and negatives I usually scan at 800 dpi.

the original scans are stored on one of my two 320 giga external HDD's, and when I need a photo, I pull a copy of the original file and give it a go with photoshop, paintshop pro or similar tools, for resizing, cleaning up and other tweaking, and the result is saved as .jpeg file.

Hope this helps
Martin