Q&A- Scanning

My friend Megan asked me this question:

Q: What is the best way to get QUALITY digital copies of photos when all I have are the actual printed photos?

A: Well, Megan, sounds like you need a good scanner! There's a lot of great scanners out there and I love how technology is getting cheaper and cheaper. Right now I use the crummy scanner at school but all I'm doing right now is scanning photos that go on the web so quality isn't a huge issue. Santa is bringing me an Epson Perfection V300 for Christmas and I can't wait. It has a lot of great features for being only $99!

Now the experts recommend scanning negatives (you always get better clarity from the source than a copy) over prints but you can still get good digital images from your prints.

Ask yourself: Where is this photo going? If you are wanting to make a print from your scan, you'll want to scan at a higher resolution (like 300 dpi) than if the pic is only going on the web (you'll only need a 72 dpi). You'll want a high resolution especially if you want the print to be enlarged.

Make sure your photo and your scanner bed are clean and free of dust and fingerprints. Some scanners come with dust-fixing software, but it's still important to reduce problems in the first place. You can crop and tweak your photos with photo editing software- I enjoy Photoshop Elements cause it's pretty easy to do what I want.

Both Kodak machines and Wal-Mart 1 hour machines have a scanner attached to them, but I don't know how well they work (and who can guarantee that they'll be clean?). You could test it out and see if that works ok for you. You can make prints or cds (or both!) with those machines.

You can visit www.scantips.com for more info on scanning.

A word about photo printing: I HATE Kodak picture machines with a passion but many people use them- I always find their printouts to be really low quality and the color is terrible. Do yourself a favor and use the Wal-Mart 1 hour photo processing instead- they do real good quality and I prefer the matte paper that they use. And they're inexpensive! Your scanned/printed images can look better or worse depending on where you get them printed.

Megan, I hope that answered your question. Let me know if you need any more help.

-Liz