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Simple Scanning Tips
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SCANNING TUTORIAL A short tutorial about scanning might be useful in helping to avoid uploading huge, uncropped, scanned images that take a long time to view and/or download. Although this author is no expert, some tips can be offered from personal experience. The most important thing about preparing images for uploading on the internet is reducing the file size while keeping the image legible. Reportedly 30 kilobytes take about 10 seconds of download time, so if you have a 300 kilobyte image it would take a minute to be able to view, which in our fast moving world can seem like an eternity. If there are several windows open on the computer, it can take even longer. In the author's experience, an image size as close to 100kb or less is ideal, when the image is just for viewing and not to be used in a graphics program. There are several ways to reduce the image size. The first one is to scan images at 72-100 dpi if the image is only for web-viewing. First crop unwanted white areas around your images which use up precious kb space. The next thing is to resize/resample the image. Make sure to view the image in real size first, so go to view and click on view at 1:1. Now resize slowly and if the image is too small than go to edit and undo. If your program lets you resize in percentage than shrink down in 10-20% increments until you get the desired size. Usually if the image is slightly smaller than your computer screen than it will be okay to upload. Don't make the image so small you have to squint to even see the image. The last thing you would do is check the file size and if its still way over 100-150kb than you may have to try to reduce the number of colors. There are 2 image formats used on the internet. Jpeg, which is a format that compresses images by deleting some pixels in the image, has to have 16 million colors, so really looks brilliant and is very popular. Gif is a format that compresses images but does not eliminate as many pixels as jpegs, but uses 256 colors or less. So if you reduce the number of colors you will have to save the image as a GIF. Zoom in on your image and slowly reduce the number of colors. Keep reducing colors slowly, as long as there is no effect on the colors you see on the screen. As soon as you see the colors change drastically, that's a signal that you went one step too far so then go to edit and undo. That should be your finished image--72-100 dip, slightly smaller than screen size, white areas the image cropped and if necessary, colors reduced as long as they don't affect the colors seen on the screen. The resulting image should be no larger than 100-150 kb.
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This tutorial was submitted by: Teresita
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