doug Nelson |
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Many people struggle with the same things here, Gretchen, so I think it's productive to try to answer your questions fully. Lucky you. Bear with me . . . You should be scanning your photos into an imaging software. I like Photoshop LE (available very reasonably on ebay) or PaintShop Pro. You would go into the software on your computer, go to Import or Get Pictures, whatever they call it, and click on your scanner. The scanner's software will come up, and you scan at whatever resolution you want. The imaging software will size an image for you, change it to a JPEG to send, enable you to fix brightness and contrast, fix dust spots or scratches, and do lots of amazing things. For archiving your scans to CD, scan them at least 300 ppi, get the brightness and contrast what you want, fix defects, or crop, and save them (one by one) to a file as TIFF images. You might even consider scanning them at 600 ppi, in case you want twice as big a print as the original later. Then go into your CD burning software and burn them to CD. That way, you have them at the highest practical quality, and you won't have to scan them again. Once they're on CD, and you've opened the CD to be sure they "took", delete the file from your hard drive and do a Defrag. You can be sure that an online storage facility is NOT storing full-size scans. They're compressing them to save space. You don't need them; you've got CD. For printing, 300 ppi will print beautifully on a photo quality printer. Print right from the CD. JPEG is a special format for compressing huge image files so that the image integrity and color are acceptable for screen viewing. Your scanner probably sends an image to JPEG for you. That may be why the quality suffers. Your imaging software can do a better job of JPEG compression than your scanner's quickie method. Be sure your image is what you want to send. Do your image editing before you change to JPEG. Every change to a JPEG image degrades it, sometimes imperceptibly, but it degrades nevertheless. Pick an image from your CD. In Photoshop, go to Image/Image Size (any other imaging software will do this, maybe using different terms) and make the long dimension of the image no more than 600 pixels long, maybe as small as 400. This will give your viewer a full-screen image, or nearly so. Then change the resolution to 72. The file size, expressed in megabytes, will drop like a rock. SAVE AS, and the software will ask you what format. (You can't do a SAVE, as your images are on CD, and your computer won't let you.) Tell it JPEG. It will ask you for a quality setting, and probably give you a preview of what the image will look like. A setting of about 7 or 8 for me doesn't cause any (visible) degradation. You might get by with a 5 or even a 4, depending on the image. You will see the file size drop still more. UNLESS you are putting these on a web page, there's no need to do draconian compression here. Your recipient will see a screen size image in a file size that won't gag his computer or give his ISP fits. Sorry to be long-winded, but we'll have to be referring people here later.
October 23, 2001
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