Scanning Your Images

When you scan your photos it is reasonably straight forward, with today's technology most of the time all you have to do is set your photo on the scanner glass and hit the scan button. Not much to it if all you want to do is view your photos on the computer, but if you want to scan your photo for an art project here are a few tips to keep in mind.

Starting with a few basics.

Before you set your photo on the scanner keep these things in mind. Position the photo the registered corner and not in the middle. If you place the photo in the middle and it is not straight when your software corrects this it will manipulate the pixels and you will lose some quality.

Only scan one photo at a time. Most scanners will automatically try to enhance the photos. It is almost impossible to make these adjustments on 2 or 3 photos at a time. All the photos will have different highlights, shadows and midtones.

Although scanner software is a little different depending on the scanner you have and the software it comes with you should have something similar to this.

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Lets take a look at some of the options

Item Type:  You will have the option to scan as a document or a photo. You want to make sure that you have photo selected. Most scanner software has this selected as the default, but it is a good idea to check.

Scan Size: Will give you the option to scan the entire scan area I do not recommend this. It will add a lot of information to your file that doesn't need to be there resulting in a larger file. In addition it will take away from the quality of the photo when you crop it to the size you need

Output Type: Your output type is where you can choose if it's color, grayscale, or black and white.Some scan software will give you option on the color output. The best is 24 bit color.

Grayscale and black and white are different.

For your photos you always want to choose grayscale. The reason is black and white is going to use one color, black. this is going to leave you with a photo that has no midtones. As you can see with the example to the left.


Resolution: This is where most of the questions come in with scanning photos.

What resolution to use? For most application 200 to 300 dpi works fine.

But you have to figure out what you would like to do with your scanned images. If all you want to do is look at it on  the computer screen anything over 72 dpi will work just fine. A photo at 72 dpi will have a 1:1 ratio what you see is what you get. For example if you scan a 4 x 6 photo it will be 4 x 6 when it is viewed on your computer at 100%. This is common for images that you would use on a website.

If you would like to take a photo and view it or print it at a larger size and maintain the quality of the original image, you need to scan it at a higher resolution. If you take a  4x6 photo and view it at  8x10. you will loose a bit of clarity. You are asking the image to use the same number of pixels to fill a much bigger space, resulting in lower quality image. This will be clearly viable. Your photo will look grainy, and the edges will start to become jagged.

Without getting to technical here is how to calculate what will work best for you.This is the formula that I use.

(Desired Output Size) X 72 / (Original Size Image)

Let's say you want to take a wallet size photo (2.5 x 3.5) and print it 14 x 17. Well 300 pixels will not do.
So take the desired dimensions and  plug the numbers into the formula. Do this with both numbers and choose the larger of the 2 and round up
(Desired Output Size) X 72 / (Original Size Image)
14 x 72 = 1080 then divide 1080 by 2.5 =  403.2
17 x 72 = 1224 then divide 1224 by 3.5 =  349.7

as a result you would want to scan your photo around 410 dpi.

One other thing to consider. What file type to use when saving your photos. If you are emailing a photo it is best to save it as a jpeg. Personally I save all my photos as jpeg. Some would suggest saving as a .png or .tiff because they do not compress the file like a .jpeg does. Personally for most of my project at home I've never had an issue with quality due to this.

Happy scanning! Do you have any suggestions or tips that help you when scanning photos? If so please leave a comment below.