Scanning photos (1 Viewer)

[Denny Oubidoux]

if your scanning a load of old photos for uploading/saving on disc is it best to do it at the highest resolution or will it soon become unmanageable in terms of filesize and memory on the pc? is jpeg the best format to go with?

i was thinking of uploading them to flickr then i'd still have the original and be able to browse the smaller sizes, if i recall the full res scans are large though.

 

[ann post]

high resolution all the way. memory drops in price every day.

 

[magicbastarder]

a six megapixel file will be enough to print to A4, and will save to a jpeg of a couple of megs, or a compressed (and lossless) TIFF of about 12MB.
so you'd get about 80 per GB.

 

[magicbastarder]

however, one must consider the source - are you scanning from prints on a flatbed scanner?

 

[ann post]

a six megapixel file will be enough to print to A4, and will save to a jpeg of a couple of megs, or a compressed (and lossless) TIFF of about 12MB.
so you'd get about 80 per GB.

indeed, a lot of old stuff i've scanned though, my aunt or somone just says 'can i get that guy on his own in a4/5x7' or something. so all of a sudden you need 5 times the resolution.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

Sounds like the whole thing could turn into a nightmare

indeed, a lot of old stuff i've scanned though, my aunt or somone just says 'can i get that guy on his own in a4/5x7' or something. so all of a sudden you need 5 times the resolution.

 

[washingcattle]

Always scan at the highest resolution you can and then and then crop from that image. generally resolution is only important when making the image think of it as a digital negative so to speak. then crop the image to between 300- 360 dpi and save as a TIFF depending on what your printing on save it as either SRGB or Adobe RGB for print and 100 dpi for screen at a4 or 5x7 the bit depth of the image won't matter that much. but it is important to get a decent printer profile and a good idea of what paper the printer is using if you want what you have on screen to resemble the finished product. to be honest though if you're scanning from a photo and cropping it's not going to look that great any way as the original photograph will usually not be produced with any of this in mind and are usually (unless it's a professionally produced C-Type or a black and white hand printed) very low res to begin with. my advice is find the neg and scan from that.

 

[Scientician 0.8]

It is remarkable how much detail/information can be found in old black and white photos. I enlarged an old passport-sized photo of my dad to A4 and it looked great.

 

[washingcattle]

Passport photos are usually made in the same way as polaroids where the image isn't enlarged so what you get is the full negative printed directly onto the paper. When images are enlarged onto paper (especially by machine) much of the detail in the negative is lost.

you should see scans of plate negs from the mid nineteenth century they put digital photography to shame.