Hi Michael, Looking at the three photos you have posted I don't think you are doing anything wrong in your scanning technique. I'm afraid there is some "sales" induced techno-babble used by scanner manufacturers. Virtually all of them claim some sort of incredible resolution ability for their scanners, but if you read the small print you will probably find the word "interpolated" associated with this resolution. What you should look for is the "Optical Resolution" specification. This tells you the true resolution capability of the scanner. Anything finer (larger number) that this is a software resampling process and is WHOLY based on the optical resolution scan. (The blurring you refer to was probably the result of excessive resampling and resulted from a mathematical attempt to create 8, 16 or even 32 pixels out of only four originals.) I find myself at a loss to explain any deeper than this without getting into a lot of boring detail - which in itself borders on techno-babble - so the key thing to remember is that the detail in the scan is set by the optical resolution and any further software resampling adds no further detail it just makes the picture appear smoother (sometimes.) Most of the regular consumer grade photographic stock of Gt, War era was rather coarse grain and so didn't carry detail particularly well. At least one of your pictures, #2, shows a coarse grain - compare it, for instance, with #3 which is surprisingly crisp and clear for the era. On the other hand photo #1 is almost certainly a professional studio shot and has, I believe, been artificially "softened" to make the subject more "handsome." Unfortunately, softening also looses detail. OK, so I know this is all irrelevant to the main thrust of your enquiry but I see a number of people scanning and posting photographs with requests for help, particularly on this list, and I thought a little demystification might help both the posters, and the "critics" who are crying for more and better detail, to understand what is possible and what is not, when scanning. Perhaps I should just add one note on post scan processing. It is sometimes possible to "enhance" photographs from this period to minimize the effects of the coarse grain photographic stock, remove some of the effects of aging (the sepia), change the photographic values to make them appear more like what we are used to today and to repair the sort of damage seen in photo #3, but don't be misled into believing that any of this is going to put back detail which wasn't in the original. The grain of the film and the optical resolution of the scanner absolutely define the available detail. Malcolm Archive CD Books Canada Inc. President: Malcolm Moody PO Box 11 Manotick Ontario, K4M 1A2 Canada. (613) 692-2667 WEB SITE: http://www.ArchiveCDBooks.ca > Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 19:14:24 +0100 > From: Michael A Lonsdale <mail@michaellonsdale.co.uk> > Subject: Re: [GREATWAR] 3 photos of soldiers > To: greatwar@rootsweb.com > Message-ID: <4672D700.2060606@michaellonsdale.co.uk> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > My Thanks to everybody who replied to my posting. I'll get round to > thank you all personally later. > > More or less everybody has asked for a higher resolution scan. > > I scanned the originals at 1200 dpi and that is what I put on line > although I did resize them from 941x1543 to 297x480. > > As requested I rescanned the badge area and the highest I could do it > was 12800dpi but they come out blurred. I'm obviously doing something > wrong. > > I've re scanned them at 4800dpi and all picture are online in their > original size. The cap bage is also in its original size and a reduced > size of approx 1024 x 581 > > Tried the buttons and they were worse than the badges. >