Can anyone suggest an appropriate resolution for scanning old documents? They are from around the 1850s and are written in slightly- faded quill pen. I want to preserve as much of the detail as possible without the scans taking up a huge amount of space. Is there a happy medium between quality and size?

On 16 May 2007 21:39:01 -0700, Yeoman <sleepingrass@gmail.com> wrote: >Can anyone suggest an appropriate resolution for scanning old >documents? They are from around the 1850s and are written in slightly- >faded quill pen. I want to preserve as much of the detail as possible >without the scans taking up a huge amount of space. Is there a happy >medium between quality and size? I scan most paper (pictures or documents) in color at 300dpi; my latest project has currently has 1500 scanned images (out of about 2000 total pieces) and is 5.6GB. The thumbnail files (no more than 600 pixels in width or height) aggregate to about 300MB (so it will fit on one CD for distribution to others). The old pix and newspaper clippings seem more "real" to other people if the original sepia/brown tones are maintained - any prints made from these scans also look more "real" to other people (my preference is gray, but there are about a dozen relatives who have some interest in the family history; having color images of non-color documents caters to them. I find that gamma changes (usually reducing it to 0.3 to 0.6) increase the contrast enough to make handwritten notes legible - sometimes changing the gamma for each color separately gives the best image (as long as you don't care about color accuracy .;-) John