Scanning Photos onto Computers

While scanning pictures onto a computer sounds complicated to beginners, the procedure isn’t really that difficult. Learning to use a scanner is essential if you want to preserve old photos, copy prints or archive photos.

Reasons for Scanning Pictures
Scanning photos is useful for a number of reasons. Perhaps the most important is creating a digital copy of your existing pictures.

A digital archive of pictures can be copied, transferred to an external storage device or CD, or used to create an online photo album. Digital photos also ensure that copies of photos are available if the originals are destroyed.

Scanning photos also allows you to edit existing photos with imaging software, such as Adobe Photoshop. Picture flaws such as red eye, contrast and lighting can be fixed by scanning images into computers. Changing a color photo into grayscale (black and white) or sepia tones is easily done by editing software, as well.

A Guide to Scanning Images
Many different scanners are available, including stand-alone scanners and printer/scanner combinations. Each scanner on the market is packaged with its own software for scanning images that you must install on your computer when you set up your scanner.

Despite the wide variety of scanner options, each scanner works in essentially the same way: Once you position the photo onto the glass plate of the scanner, you simply open the scanner software and follow the directions.

Most, if not all, scanners will show you a preview of the photo you want to scan. Before scanning photos, however, you have to make a few decisions about picture quality and image file types.

Scanner Resolution
Scanner resolution determines the image quality of the scanner photo. When scanning images, resolution is measured in dpi, or dots per inch.

While smaller dpi settings will result in less picture resolution (not as highly defined), they do create small files with correspondingly small pictures, saving space on your hard drive. Lower dpi settings are good for photos that you will display online or send by e-mail.

Here’s a list of standard dpi settings that people use when scanning photos:

* 72 to 100 dpi : Although these settings provide lower quality resolution when scanning photos, they produce much smaller files when the image is scanned at 100 percent. Seventy-two to 100 dpi scans can be e-mailed without causing extremely long download times.
* 300 dpi : Use this dpi setting to maintain the quality of a four-inch-by-six-inch or five-inch-by-seven-inch photo that you are going to view or print at the same size of the original photo.
* 600 to 1,000 dpi : A high dpi setting will produce extremely large files that take up a lot of memory. These large files are best used for scanning pictures with high sentimental value or older heirloom pictures in which you want to produce the sharpest image possible. In both cases, you may want the highest degree of quality. People also use high dpi settings if they want to enlarge images without sacrificing quality.

Scanning Images: File Formats
A scanner usually scans images when the user clicks the “Save” button or selects “Save” through the scanner software menus.

However, before scanning images, users need to determine what type of file form they will use to save the images.

Here are the most common file formats for scanning pictures:

* Bitmaps (.bmp) are large files that produce high-quality images.
* Jpegs or Jpgs (.jpgs) compress files but lose some quality due to compression techniques.
* Tiff files (.tiff) produce very detailed but very large files.
* Giff files (.giff) are small, compressed files that are ideal for website use and for e-mailing scanned images.

The results of scanning photos will differ widely depending on which file formats and dpi resolution you select. Experimenting with a scanner while scanning pictures helps to give you some idea of which file formats and resolutions work best for individual pictures.