I work with jpg, usually at the 80% quality selection. The trick is to do all image adjustments in one go, as the image loss is cumulative, getting a little worse each time you load the file into your editor, adjust it, save and exit. Instead, load, adjust, adjust and adjust -till perfect- then save and exit. Also these increasing imperfections hardly show in a real world picture or scan, being lost at first in the normal picture noise. I did an open-adjust-save sequence three times on a 60% quality jpg of a text file (direct from draw program, not scanned, so it had no noise). In this case extreme zoom showed awful pixel scattering, but without zoom it was quite tolerable. YMMV. Color is better for special cases such as dirty images, where the dirt is a different color than the printing. You can play with the color channels to bring out the ink, suppress the grime. Except for that, go with B&W, but NOT 8-bit. A lot of census images and especially photographs of documents have a wide range of exposure, and you need all the depth you can get. The file size is 2x larger for 16 bit B&W, but still much smaller than for color. Ol' Bab On 5/12/2012 3:37 PM, Nivard Ovington wrote: Thanks David Appreciate the feed back The Epson V700 has a max resolution of 6400, way higher than needed really for most cases There is a point with photos where the greater resolution brings no value, just a larger image size Agree with you on TIFF rather than JPEG as JPEGs diminish each time, TIFFs remain lossless Also agree with the comment on cleanliness, they are dust magnets, and of course the better the scan of the negative, the better the scan of the dust also :-( Not worried about printing as thats not something I want or need to do, digital is far better in my opinion, plus it saves money (and the planet I guess :-) I also use Irfanview The Epson V700 has a light above as well as below the negative so no need for the white paper in this ones case It seems to handle the colour negatives OK but have only done a few testers, its the black and white I have more concern over My fear is having to do them all again at a later date, as its very time consuming I would rather do it all in one go if I can Appreciate your advice Its interesting to see the results of the scans I have done so far , most I have never seen before as they are from way before I was born Nivard Ovington in Cornwall (UK) >> What I learned from the presenters on this. >> >> 1. Scan them at MAXImum dpi setting. If your scanner has 600 as top, use >> that. 1200? Use that. >> >> 2. Save them in tiff, not jpg or any other format. Tiff is loss-proof. > ===== > If you would prefer digest mode to mail mode, drop a note to roots-admin@rootsweb.com and ask for the digest... > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to ROOTS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >