This is from RootsWeb Review this week and has good information about how best to scan and save photos. Tips on Scanning Photos By Louise Power power_louise@hotmail.com I would like to add some information to the article by Cathy Herrin, Wasilla, Alaska, on scanning family photos. As a desktop publisher, I find that the most important thing is to scan photos at a high resolution. The preferred resolution for publications is 300 dpi (dots per inch). It will take up more room on your CDs, but it will make your photo much better in any publication. You may not be planning a publication at this point, but someone in your family may in the future. You can always reduce the size of a copy of the photo to 72 dpi for Web publication. If you understand the principle behind this, you'll see why it's important. Photos are not made up of solid color or black and white masses. They're made up of thousands of pixels (short for picture element) or pieces of information. If you scan a photo of a certain size at 72 dpi, a common resolution for Web photos, it will look fine on a website even if you make it smaller. If you try to enlarge the picture for, say, publication, you end up enlarging each pixel giving the photo a fuzzy look. Just remember, you can always take information out of a photo by resaving it at a lower resolution, but once that's done, you can't put information back into the picture. In 2001, Texas A&M University's Agricultural Communications Dept. published some guidelines for photos used in publications. They said, in part: "Avoid saving images as JPEGs. JPEG is a compressed image format. Saving an image as a JPEG reduces the size of the file, which is convenient in terms of storage space. However, compressing also degrades the image. The more times you open a JPEG, make changes, and resave it as a JPEG, the more the image deteriorates. If you must use the JPEG file type, take photos at the highest possible resolution and then do not open your images or manipulate them in any way. Simply copy them to your computer (or a disk or CD) and then forward the files to the editor of your publication. The preferred file type for publication is TIF. A TIF file can be edited without losing data. Uncompressed PICT files and EPS files also are acceptable. "A 72 ppi image is fine for viewing on a computer monitor; 300 ppi is the resolution required if an image is headed for a printing press. "Another way to understand resolution is in its relationship to image size. If a 72 ppi image is 17.7 x 14.2 inches on your monitor, it will be just 4.3 x 3.4 inches when sized for printing at 300 ppi. So, if you submit a 72 ppi image to use in a publication, the largest size at which it can be printed will be about one-fourth of its original size." And I say, always assume that at some point your photos will be used in a publication, so make them the best that you can. Another thing is never work on your original scan. When you open it up, immediately save it as a copy and work on the copy. Then, if you mess it up, you can always go back to the original. As I said above, you can always take information out of a photo by resaving it at a lower resolution, but once that's done, you can't put information back into a picture. If you work on a copy, however, you'll always have the original to go back to. On your CD, you may want to make two folders, one for the original, high resolution photos and one for the lower resolution copies. You can name each one the same except use HR or LR to denote the different resolutions. Lastly, for longevity, I recommend investigating gold CDs which many institutions now use for archiving electronic media since gold does not deteriorate. ***************************** Sally Rolls Pavia sallypavia2001@yahoo.com List Owner: GENEALOGYBITSANDPIECES-L-request@rootsweb.com Archives: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/GENEALOGYBITSANDPIECES "All incoming and outgoing email checked by Norton Anti-Virus"