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04/22/2005 07:25:29 PM · #1 |
My family has asked me to scan a lot of old photographs. When I say a lot I mean about 500 or so dating back to the 1940's. I don't want to scan them using the wrong dpi setting.
Question 1: What is the best DPI setting to scan with? Images will be put on disk for printing and another disk for viewing on Computer and DVD player.
Question 2: Should B&W photographs be scanned in B&W? |
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04/22/2005 07:39:03 PM · #2 |
1. The highest optical setting your scanner has for archiving.
2. yes.
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04/22/2005 07:39:07 PM · #3 |
Use the highest "optical" (not interpolated) resolution your scanner is capable of.
I would scan in color -- you want the chance to preserve any toning applied by the original photographer/lab. Just get a big external hard drive and save them there, plus a backup to CD/DVD. Storage is cheap, and you can always throw away unneeded data, but you don't want to have to rescan anything. |
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04/22/2005 07:42:55 PM · #4 |
My scanner has the following DPI settings:
100
150
300
600
1200
2400
4800
9600
19200
And I'm scanning straight into PS/CS.
The reason I asked about the B&W. I test scanned a 3 1/2x5 B&W in the color mode and I picked up some yellowing color in areas that I can't see on the picture.
Message edited by author 2005-04-22 19:48:06. |
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04/22/2005 07:43:51 PM · #5 |
1.) 3 dpi - the images will come out crappy and unidentifiable, but it will take a lot less time to get through the pile.
2.) If you take my advice, it really won't matter.
LOL |
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04/22/2005 07:56:40 PM · #6 |
I recently scanned a couple of old 6x4s at 300dpi (if I remember correctly). After cropping to the photo size, the jpegs were ~976x654 pixels and at max quality save in PS saved at 420KB. The quality is fine for full screen presentation (Maybe not the best quality for printing again thou).
On second thoughts, for family stuff high quality is prob'ly best. Maybe find the highest dpi that lets you put all the shots on one DVD?
Message edited by author 2005-04-22 20:07:02. |
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04/22/2005 08:38:38 PM · #7 |
Originally posted by SDW65:
My scanner has the following DPI settings:
100
150
300
600
1200
2400
4800
9600
19200
And I'm scanning straight into PS/CS.
The reason I asked about the B&W. I test scanned a 3 1/2x5 B&W in the color mode and I picked up some yellowing color in areas that I can't see on the picture. |
Determine what is the actual highest optical resolution the scanner supports and use that. If required, you can downsample up to about 2:1 and not lose much information at all. That would also reduce noise somewhat.
The yellowing that the scanner picks up but you don't see is because the scanner actually sees color differently than you do. Like GeneralE, i would still scan in color, and then choose how to convert later. 500 pics is not really that many, though it will take time to go through. I'm in the middle of a 3300-slid scanning project that I've been slowly working at for 2 years, LOL.
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04/22/2005 08:51:38 PM · #8 |
Most scanners can hit 1200 DPI optically, this will be far more resolution then almost any print will have. Many print have little info past 300 DPI, scanning at 600 DPI will get you all the data that is in a print. If you are going to be scanning 500 photos you will likely find that even 600 DPI seems very slow.
400 DPI it a pretty good over all number to use. Going past 600 will not give you any advantage, give it a
try and see, scan a sharp photo at 300, 600 and 1200 and then make an 8 x 10 print from each, you might see an improvement going from 300 to 600 if the print is sharp enough but you will not see any improvement going from 600 to 1200.
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