I have not done much scanning before and now I have a project to scan a large number of mainly old black and white photographs. There are also some newer colour ones and colour negatives. What are the best resolutions to use for B&W photos, colour photos and colour 35mm negatives? Also, is there a prefered format to save them in.
Regards,
Glyn
When I scan fotos I scan at 300 or 400 dpi; for negatives use the highest resolution your scanner has for scanning. Save as .tif (TIFF) so there will be no loss of quality, espically when you re-save.
If you want to make big prints, 8x10 or larger, or do some cropping, scan at a larger dpi. Generally I find 400 will handle an 8x10 just fine if there is not too much cropping, 600 if quite a bit.
If prints are to be 5x7 or smaller, 300 or 400 dpi is fine and the files aren't too large.
Do expect your files to be huge. 12 to 25 MB are a standard when I scan using .tif
Archive type scans, I leave them large and burn them to cd/dvd as soon as I can .
Remember you can always make them smaller and they will look good, but you can try to make them larger, but I guarantee they will look absolutely horrible.
Thanks Matofthemint and Train.