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Garry Black Photography

Question:

I want to get a number of my images scanned so that I can use them on the internet. I know very little about this and I thought you might be the best person to start with.

Where do you get your images scanned and at what resolution? Do you have them put on a CD-ROM or some other storage device? What kind of software do I need to access these images? I am not sure I want to get into software as powerful as Photoshop (especially at a price tag these days of $1000) nor do I necessarily want to manipulate my images (but I will probably want to do that in the future).

Also do you have any thoughts on a reasonably good color printer to print such images?

Hope you don't mind all the questions!

Answer:

I have the Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED film scanner, I upgraded from the LS-2000, so I scan all of my own images. Before I bought my first scanner, I was getting my scans done at the Focus Centre here in Ottawa, Ginn's also have this service, as do most film labs. You can have them burned onto a CD or a Zip cartridge.

When I scan my images I save them on my hard drive in order to work on them. Once I have finished with them I then write the images to a CD for storage. Sometimes I will save the image with all of the layers, if I think that some where down the road I might use part of that image with different elements.

If you are only going to be using them for the web you don't need a very large file size or a very high resolution scan. 900 DPI (2.5MB file size) should be large enough to do any corrections to the image. From any scan you get done, you will have to sharpen it (bring it back into focus). For images that I'm going to work on I scan them at 4000 DPI; the file size is around 40MB. If I am only going to use an image for my web site I use a 2.5MB file and then reduce the image size and resolution to 72 DPI. The best format to save these images for the web is in JPG as you can open these in almost any basic graphics program.

There is a cheaper Adobe Photoshop program "Photoshop Elements", It has quite a few functions that the full version does, but at a fraction of the price.

The printer that I have is an Epson Stylus 600 (purchased in 1997) it is pretty good (not quite the quality of a photographic print); the newer models are even better. I haven't really looked at them seriously because I don't print that many pictures. But from what I understand the Epson 1280 is suppose to be very good.