Keep Photo Scanning Costs Low

Dont be fooled into paying a photo scanner extra money to scan your typical photographs at higher than 300 dpi. Just because a scanning services offers photo scanning at 600 and 1200 dpi doesn’t mean that you are actually getting a higher quality scan. What it means is that you are paying extra money for something you are not really getting.

There might be a reason to scan at 600 or 1200 dpi if you were scanning from a negative because they are designed to to hold and transfer much more information than a photograph surface. So if you plan to enlarge images try scanning the negatives. Resolution that would require scanning a photo’s surface at higher than 300 dpi just isn’t there.

Photo scanning typical photographs at higher than 300 dpi has a downside beyond the extra cost. Higher resolutions create bigger files and that means slower loading and bigger file storage requirements. Most of the uses that people scan their ordinary photos for require smaller files and that means resizing your 600 and 1200 dpi files smaller. Thats time consuming and wasteful.

If you are a professional photographer or someone with a great deal of expertise in photography and photo scanning then you have already developed an understanding of what your particular needs are. If you are not well versed in photo scanning and are just looking to scan your typical photographs then you need to check out Wayne Fultons excellent article on this and other scanning topics at www.scantips.com.

Make sure that your scanned photos are saved as a high quality jpeg. Photos saved in a jpeg format are compressed to lower the file size. High compression causes the jpeg to loose bits of information that are gone forever. High quality jpegs have very low compression and lose very little.

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.

Photo enhancement can require that your jpeg scans are re-compressed. This can diminish their quality if it is repeated frequently. Make sure your photo scanning service creates a copy of your original scans to enhance. You may feel that you can do better on some photos than what automatic enhancement provides. In that case you will want to go to your master scans, and make a new copy to start from.

If your photo scanning service offers inexpensive automatic photo enhancement it might be wise to take advantage of it. Even though there are lots of good free photo editing software out there it can be extremely time consuming and boring. So let the photo scanner run your photos through the automatic enhancement program especially if this is a low cost service, and save the manual improvement for a few really special photographs. You can also purchase automatic enhancement software, but trying to figure which ones actually work can be a daunting task.