"Nikko" …
I’m about to start the process of scanning hundreds of old family photos. I don’t really know a ton about how this stuff works and would love to have a few questions answered before I get too far into the project.
I am engaged in the same project for my family photos.
My scanner supports up to 1200 DPI. The next step down is 600 DPI. I don’t know which to use. My instinct is go with the higher DPI because we’re going to want to have these pictures forever and the scans may end up being the only copies we have if something happens to the originals.
That is my thinking, too. The pack-rat nature runs in my family. I hate to lose even a single bit of data.
On the other
hand, the difference in size is substantial: over 26 MB for 1200 DPI and only 6.5 for 600 DPI.
Yes, indeed! I recently scanned 68 photots that were taken with my boyhood camera, a Kodak 110. I saved each picture as a TIFF, no compression, 48-bit color, about 80 MB per photo. I could only fit 50 of my scanned photos on a DVD. Those are the largest scans as a series that I have.
What are the pros and cons of each? Is 1200 DPI overkill?
I have been experimenting. My scanner, an Epson Perfection 3200 Photo, supports up to 3200 dpi optical resolution. I have only once used it at full resolution, just as a test of a tiny spot. I am of the opinion that there is no reason to scan the photo past the point at which the grain of the photos becomes obvious. My parents generally used bargain film, whatever was cheapest, so it is not at all difficult for me to overscan the photos, or even the negatives. Usually, 600 dpi is sufficient, though I am increasing the resolution for the newer photos, because the quality of the film they bought improved every few years.
I have mostly black & white photos to scan, but some are in color. Should I use the higher setting for just the color photos, both or neither? Any advice would be much appreciated.
Of course, b&w photos need less space for the same resolution, because they can be scanned as grayscale, instead of color (make sure you select grayscale instead of color when you scan them). But, I scan at the resolution at which I begin to notice grain in the scan. I experiment to find this resolution with each batch of photos.
Also, I’m just planning on saving the scans in the jpeg format. Any reason not to? Should I be using a different file format?
For archiving in which I want to maintain the full details, I must use a lossless file format. The difference between my scans of my 110 photos saved as TIFF and those converted to JPEG is obvious when viewed side-by-side. Even at high-quality JPEG, the photos are fuzzier, blurrier, than the TIFFs. Of course, they are also much smaller.
You don’t necessarily have to save your files as TIFF, but I am somewhat familiar with its specifications, and I feel most comfortable in using it for this purpose. Other times, I use PNG, or Adobe Elements’ native PDF. I don’t remember right now if PDF is lossless, though I think it is not.
Of course, just running my scans through all this processing loses some image quality. Adobe Elements does not even support the color depth at which I am scanning, and neither do some file formats. I don’t remember the bit depth that PNG suppports, but GIF is only an 8-bit format; I don’t recommend using GIF for any sort of archiving, for several reasons.
It is true that high-quality scans take up a lot of space, but I believe this is a time to be generous, and not stingy. These scans are meant to last for many years, and so we should take the long-term outlook. I always try to get the highest quality product of anything that I intend to have for a long time. Also, the cost of storage space is dropping rapidly, and the expectations of quality are rising. One of these days, someone is going to develop a video display with the quality we now use for professional offset printing (probably next century ;P).
There has been a lot of discussion about the lifespan of CDs. Professional archivers are experimenting with many approaches to make documents last and remain accessible for many years. No one actually knows how long any CD can reasonably last, but proper storage certainly helps extend their life. But, home-burned CDs are based on dyes, and the lifespan of the information on the home-burned CD cannot be more secure than the dye (OK, some scientist may develop a way to recover the information from a CD based on nano-trace samples remaining on the plastic, or some such). The approach I am using now is to save on both archival hard drives and CD/DVD media. The magnetic media is likely to be readable (with appropriate technology) for centuries, probably longer than the DVDs. Of course, the hard drives cost more than the DVDs.
In the end, you should anticipate that your data may have to be converted to new formats, but physically and logically, from time-to-time.
