Scanning multiple photographs to be printed later.

Many thanks for all the feedback here. A few answers to some of the questions/suggestions made here:

1. This particular batch of prints I’m working on are 3” x 3”. I’ve got many more however at varying sizes that I’ll be dealing with.

2. A suggestion was made to scan as TIFF as this will be better for long term archiving purposes, which makes sense but as these will eventually be made available to family members who will likely use some kind of online photo printing service and many of these do not accept TIFF files, I’ll likely have to make a duplicate of each TIFF scan as JPG. Does this present any particular issues/challenges?

3. It was suggested that to give me greater flexibility down the road, I scan to a resolution of 4800 PPI. I’ve found I can achieve this by manually overriding Photoshops default max of 600 but in so doing the scanning process is incredibly slow and the file output size very high ( a 3”x3” photo scanned in this manner is over 40MB in size). Given that I need to scan through hundreds of photos I’m not sure that such a process is feasible especially as I’m then presented with storage challenges. Given this, is there a compromise here that provides me a high resolution file that will work well for re-printing as well as providing good archiving and flexibility down the road?

4. In terms of software, I’m not using anything that came bundled with the Canon scanner, rather I’m relying solely on Photoshop.

Invest in VueScan, its the best consumer scanner software on the market.

Scanning at 600dpi/ppi is probably fine, although you can try the built-in print settings.

Hi digital vibe,

In order to get the best out of that Canon scanner you'll need to access a maximum resolution setting (and, I think, scan in RGB not "Black & White") :
Canon say it offers high resolution scans up to 2400 x 4800 ppi, pretty good.

So, any PPI you set is based on the inch size of the original image. (it's PPI really = Pixels Per Inch) DPI is dots per inch and that’s about printing not scanning.

Anyway in a scan 300 PPI = 300 DPI.

If you did set it to 600 DPI (as you mentioned) then if you double the size of an image later it'll only be 300 DPI. Does that make sense? So, even 600PPI isn't ideal for "archiving".

To give you plenty of options later, maybe for enlargements, you should definitely be using the max resolution of 2400 x 4800 PPI.

I've no idea though why the scanner is giving you 72PPI, that’s weird if you set it to 300. Anyway, try scanning at maximum resolution, that’s what I'd do.

I would recommend you scan in RGB, Photoshop will likely do a far better job of making a neutral black & white / monochrome image out of a scanned original than the scanner itself does.

Do you really want neutral black & white / monochrome images anyway? Many old pictures benefit from a bit of a tint, perhaps sepia? Adding a tint can be . great creative process, enjoyable.

I hope this helps

if so, please do mark my reply as "helpful" and if you're OK now, please mark it as "correct" below, so others who have similar issues can see the solution

thanks

neil barstow, colourmanagement

Always scan such work at the highest native optical ppi available (not interpolated ppi). I’d compare an RGB scan of a grayscale original vs. a gray scan, you may have more options in Photoshop for creating the gray version from varying data in the R, G or B channels.

what are the pixe width and height of scans? What is the print size of the scans at 72ppi?

I'm not familiar with this scanner, but there should be an option in the scanning software for setting the output dpi, set it to 300. The correct term is ppi – pixels per inch, but you'll often find dpi used in scanning software.

Ppi works like this: Pixel dimensions divided by ppi = Printed size in inches.

So if you have an image that's 1200 x 1800 pixels at 300 ppi, it will print at 4 by 6 inches.

Ppi has no effect on screen viewing, the image will display according to its pixel dimensions.

For best results, you should not scan as jpg, which uses lossy compression, and the image will degrade every time you save it. Jpg is a final format, not intended for editing. If possible, use tiff. If you're going to do heavy editing on these files, it would be best to use 16-bit tiff, but that may not be an option in the scanning software.

When you're done editing, you can save out jpg copies to send to people, keeping the tiffs as master files.