Scanning Tips

Scanning your home photos can be enjoyable and relatively simple if you follow a few basic steps. Below we have tried to lay out some basic steps to help you get good scans from a home scanner.

Scanning Photos Step 1 – Choosing a scanner

Home scanners have advanced considerably in the past few years. They have gone from expensive, slow, junky models to affordable machines that can produce a decent quality scan. Choosing a scanner, with all of the advertising and resolution numbers they put on the boxes, can be difficult. Basically the numbers don’t mean as much as they try to make them appear to. Resolution numbers have become a big marketing theme so a lot of manufacturers have used questionable mathematical formulas to boost their resolution numbers making them look more impressive than their competitors. One company’s claim of 4800dpi might in reality have the same resolution capabilities of the competitor’s scanner that is labeled at 2400 dpi. The bottom line is, don’t get too caught up in the whole number illusion. You can usually do well if you get a reputable name brand that will scan at least 2X better than the resolution you want to scan.

Scanning Photos Step 2 – Preparing your photos

Make sure photos are fairly clean and dust free. If you start placing dusty photos on your scanner, your scanner bed will accumulate dust and streaks quickly causing your scans to look poor. The best and easiest way to clean dusty photos is with a dry soft cloth. Be cautious of ever using a wet cloth on photo because the water can damage the photos.

Scanning Photos Step 3 – Preparing your scanner

Make sure the scanner glass is clean before you try to scan anything. Dirt or smears on the glass will show up on your photo scans. Manufacturers recommend using lens cleaner solution with a non-abrasive cloth. However, you can also buy packages of pre-moistened lens cloths at department or office stores at a fairly inexpensive price. Some people use window cleaner and paper towels. Something designed for lens cleaning is usually preferred.

Scanning Photos Step 4 – Setting up your scanner

Be sure to place your scanner on flat, stable surface. Any shaking or movement during scanning can make your scan blurry or unclear. The motion of the scanning mechanism can be enough to cause shaking on an unstable surface.

Scanning Photos Step 5 – Setting your dpi

Photos for printing need to be at least 300-600dpi. You should make sure not to make it too high, though. If the dpi is much higher than 600dpi, the file becomes so large your computer might have trouble opening and editing them.

Scanning Photos Step 6 – Choosing your format

TIFF format is the preferred format for scanning master copies or archiving. Most image handling software can work with this format. However, if you are scanning your photos to send one time through email, you should probably stick to jpeg. See our format article for more about the pros and cons of each type of photo format.

Scanning Photos Step 7 – Actual scanning

All scanners have a little different version of scanning software. For the most part, the software is designed to be fairly user friendly. You place your photo on the scanner, push start and follow the prompts on your computer screen.

There are many different functions in the software that you may be tempted to use to cut the time it takes to actually scan and save your photos. The one we feel can be the most troublesome (and is often automatically turned on) is auto cropping. Auto cropping on a scanner can sometimes take off more of your photos than you want it to. If that is the case, auto cropping can be turned off and you can crop your photos manually either in the scanning preview or in your photo editing software. If you are having trouble getting the full scan or things appear to be cut off, make sure you have this turned off.

There can be a lot of issues when scanning photographs. There is not a one push “easy button” to make your life easier. Some scanners claim to have this, but most of the time, it will not give you the desired results. You should be sure to read the manual about some of the settings, especially if you are having trouble with something specific. Most manuals have a troubleshooting section to help you narrow down what your problem might be.