Thursday, February 16, 2012

Short Tips for Scanning Heritage Photos

I have two little scanning tips for you before moving on to thoughts about scrapping the photos.

Beware of JPEG

Are you aware that saving a photo as a JPEG will cause minor loss in quality? I'm not saying it's bad, but that you just need to be aware of that fact.

If you scan a photo and it needs no editing or minor editing, go ahead and save it as JPEG (or JPG) at a high quality. It will save disk space and the quality will be nearly as good as your scan.

If, however, you scan a photo that needs a lot of editing you may want to save the scan in a higher quality format until you finish the edit. My personal preference is BMP, though there are other choices. I found that a test BMP file shrank to less than 20 percent when saved as a JPEG. To save disk space, do the final save as JPEG and delete the BMP.

If you would rather have the quality, choose a high-quality format for your photos and avoid JPEG entirely.

Now you're aware.


Don't Feed Heritage Photos

Feeding photos or documents into a scanner that pulls them through can tear or damage them. It's far better to use a flatbed scanner and just lay your precious photo on the glass where it will not be touched by any feed wheels.

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