Digital photography starts with the creation of the digital image file. Some naively believe digital photography is all about using a camera with a digital sensor. This is just a beginning. The most important part of digital photography takes place after the image file is created.
Digital photography ranges from simple adjustments of exposure and color balance through to complex manipulation and combination of images. The end results are then shared via the web or printed for display.
Scanning prints, even if they came from a film negative originally, now places the image into a digital photography workflow. The main example image below is from a print in good condition that has been hiding away in a photo album for about 25 years. Now it has new life after a quick scan and it is on Facebook, bringing back memories for a family and friends.
Choosing a Scanner
Scanning for home or web use does not require a high cost specialist photo scanner, the article example scans were done by a Hewlett Packard Photosmart C309 multifunction printer, fax, copier and scanner.
For web use on Facebook or sharing family memories by email the potential quality of the scanner exceeds the requirements. One of the main differences between scanners intended mainly for documents and devices such as the Epson V500 photo scanner is speed. Professional photographers and photo restorers pay more for equipment with faster scanning speed. For occasional home use slower speed is not a major disadvantage.
Scanning Resolution
It is not necessary to use the highest possible scanning resolution to create a good quality digital image for web use. The example picture was scanned at 300 pixels per inch (ppi ) to produce a 4.6megabit image file in the uncompressed TIFF format. This gives a 1532 x 1048 pixel image that is still too big for everyday web use.
There are two scans of the same model car picture in the example photos, on scanned at 200 ppi at the HP scanner’s normal bit depth and one at 600 ppi at the highest bit depth. The end result from a print in ideal condition is not obviously different. Although the original file sizes were markedly different. The 200 ppi jpeg came out at 370KB while the 600 ppi and higher bit depth file came in at just over 49MB.
Resizing the 200ppi car image from the initial scan size of 1192 x 792 pixels down to 790 x 520 reduce the file size down to 160KB, just below suite101‘s upper size limit for images.
The much larger file sizes produce their own problems for photographers to ensure they have the computing power and storage to cope with them. And of course fro web use they have to be resized and resolution lowered to make them suitable for web viewing.
The basic resolution produces acceptable results for prints in good condition for easy resizing for web use. For more intensive work such as restoring old photos higher resolutions are preferred.
Digital Processing
Even though the prints were in good condition and did not need any restorative work a little bit fine color adjustment and cropping was possible once the image had been digitized. The main operations in photo editing software are resizing and some sharpening, as all images need sharpening after resizing. The normal process is that image sharpening is the last process in a digital workflow, so turn off any sharpening options in the scanner software.
Clean The Scanner Bed
The glass bed of a flatbed scanner may look clean but it can have small specks of paper on its surface. These come from other source documents, particularly older paper documents. They may not be immediately obvious but they soon show up as specks on the scanned image.
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