Sorting Out Inexpensive Photo Scanning Services by Pete Fontaine

If you're not going to enlarge your digital scans then don't pay to have them scanned at a higher resolution than 300 dpi. Even if you will be enlarging them you are probably wasting your money. 600 and 1200 dpi scanning services do not mean better scans, but they do mean higher prices. For your typical photographs 300 dpi is the wisest choice.

A photo prints surface is not designed to hold the type of resolution that a photo negative is. If you plan on enlarging scanned images you are far better off scanning the negative if possible.

Wasting money is not the only reason to scan at 300 dpi. Photo scanning beyond 300 dpi produces huge files that slow down just about any use of your scans. Editing, viewing, and working with your files will be slower, and possibly much slower. And you will probably have to change the size of your scan smaller to use it for just about anything.

Top notch photographers don't need to be coached on scanning practices as they already understand the issues. But if you are trying to gather some information to use for your own scanning project or to purchase scanning services, I recommend the relatively extensive discussion of scanning practices by Wayne Fulton at http://www.scantips.com

Most respectable photo scanning services will save your scans as a high quality jpeg. This is the most popular format. Jpeg files that are highly compressed to produce smaller files loose bits of information and can reduce the quality of your photos. High quality jpegs are compressed very little and lose very little information. You can reduce the file size later as required.

Dont rotate your original scans. When you send your photos in to be scanned, they are in a stack generally without consideration as to whether they are in portrait or landscape mode. Because rotating your jpeg scans recompresses them 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 photos look better. But they dont make all of your photos look their best.

There are 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 images and some good to the rest. Manual enhancement should probably only be used for those very special photographs otherwise you will be bored silly. Trying to choose an automatic enhancement software can be tricky because it takes some experimentation to discover which ones actually work. If your photo scanning service provides economical automatic enhancement that may be your best bet.

About The Author

If your family's precious photographic record has not been permanently preserved then you need to learn more about photo scanning and photo scanning services. Pete Fontaine provides more information on the subject at his website http://www.Nickelscan.com