scanner resolution setting for colour photos

firbyfred

I am scanning old colour photographs 6" x 4" with my oldish scanner and it has 3 settings for resolution 150, 300, 600, I have been doing them on the 600 setting, but it takes a long time, would it make much difference using a lower setting? I will only be using them for screen savers, digital photo frame, maybe view them on a flat screen tv etc.

espresso

You could use the lowest setting for screen savers. Try a couple of scans and see if you can notice any difference

Rich44_2

300dpi would be fine that's what we pretty much scan at and we print ours out.

You may well be better off looking at a new scanner as there's more to quality than just dpi, what scanner is it?

diable

Why don't you scan them at each resolution and see what they look like?

johnmc

I don't do a lot of scans but FME you need to scan as high as possible and then turn the resolution down.

It may just be my scanner :rolleyes:, but if I leave it at low resolution the shadows are SOOOOO dark that the pictures aren't much use and no amount of tweaking will help.

Obviously high resolutions = long scans.

Rich44_2

There is not much point in going over 300dpi anyway unless you're going to really want to blow them up to a huge size later it's just a massive waste of space and time tbh.

Low resolution shouldn't affect the brightness like that I suspect that's probably a bug in a driver somewhere shouldn't affect anything like that at all

firbyfred

Thanks
It is an old mustek 1200, I may try scanning 1 photo on all 3 settings to see if there is much difference, I am not too bothered about the quality, they are only holiday snaps, but would like to speed up the process.

john_s_2

firbyfred wrote: »

I am scanning old colour photographs 6" x 4" with my oldish scanner and it has 3 settings for resolution 150, 300, 600, I have been doing them on the 600 setting, but it takes a long time, would it make much difference using a lower setting? I will only be using them for screen savers, digital photo frame, maybe view them on a flat screen tv etc.

At 6"x4" @ 150 DPI you'll get images that are 900 x 600 pixels large. At 300 DPI you'll get 1800 x 1200. The former image would probably stretch OK to fit whatever size screen you have but I'd be very surprised if your screen is larger than 1800x1200, so I'd go with 300 DPI.

Another thought is the aspect ratio. AFAIK there isn't a monitor with a 6x4 ratio so if you don't want the image to distort when shown at full-screen you'll want to crop the image (not the original photo!) to be the same ratio as the screen you intend to view it on (in full-screen - eg as a screensaver). Eg, if you have a 1024x768 screen (fairly common size for a 17" monitor, say) this is 4x3 ratio. So with your 1800x1200 image you'd want to downsize it to 1152x768 (which is still 6x4) then crop it to 1024x768 (which would mean cutting a bit off the sides when viewed in landscape).

Just a few thoughts. Probably a bit too much information. Do what looks good!