steps to take

May 24, 2015 16:30:53 GMT arabma said:

Currently XP and pse7. Should I start by scanning the photos into pse?

I, too, have PSE-7 and it is capable of doing most everything I need.

As for scanning the photos, a lot of how you go about it depends on your scanner capabilities.

I have Windows 7 and prefer to first scan my photos into a folder and then load them into Elements from that folder.

I have scanned several straight into Elements and that works okay as well.

I suggest setting scanner resolution to 600 DPI (dots per inch; so far as I can figure, DPI is the same as PPI)

If your scanner is capable, I also suggest scanning in as Photoshop PSD files; if PSD is not available, then use TIFF.

Before we knew any better, my wife (and myself) have scanned in hundreds upon hundreds as jpegs and, to my untrained eye, I see little difference in the finished product.

I believe capturing plenty of DPI is the most important factor.

Of course, insuring a CLEAN scanner and CLEAN dust- and lint-free photos is most important; whatever dirt may be on the prints or scanner transfer right onto the digital images.

Much smarter people than me will have better information.  

NO, DPI is not the same as PPI although many people and some applications get them confused. 

They are 2 totally different things.

PPi (pixels per inch) is meaningless when viewing images on a screen and is used solely to size an image for printing.  A general rule of thumb is you need 300 PPI to make a good quality print - eg. for a 6in x 4in print you need an image at least 1800px x 1200px.

DPI (dots per inch) is what printers use to print an image at the set printer resolution (dpi). Eg.  If you send a 300 PPI image to a printer set at, say, 1440 DPI then essentially the printer driver takes 300px of RGB data and converts it to 1440 dots of printer data (how much of each coloured ink to lay down on the paper) to make 1in of print.

Regarding what PPI to set your scanner at, that depends on what you want to do with the scanned images.  If you are only ever going to view them on a computer screen then 200 PPI should be more than enough.  Larger PPI settings will only create larger files that take up more real estate on your hard disk drive.

If you plan to make prints at the same size as the original paper print, then 300 PPI is all you need to set the scanner at.

If you want to make print enlargements of your original photos then the PPI you set your scanner at depends on the size of the enlargement. Eg.  If your original paper photo is 6in x 4in and you want to make a 12in x 8in print then you need to set your scanner to 600 PPI so that you will have 300 PPI available for a 12in x 8in print.

If you can, invest in a good quality scanner.  It will make a big difference to the quality of the scanned image and you should spend less time adjusting colours etc of the scanned image in an editor.

I would recommend storing your scanned images in an uncompressed format - PSD if using Photoshop Elements or TIFF.  The down side of storing jpegs is that even if you set compression to minimum, every time you save a jpg file after opening it, you compress it that little bit more and lose a bit more image quality every single time.

PSD are larger files but much better for editing and storing images than jpegs.

Scan the images as jpegs at an appropriate PPI, edit them if necessary and if using Photoshop Elements save them as PSD files (uncompressed).  The Elements Organiser displays thumbnails of the images in your catalogue whether they are PSD or jpeg.  The PSD file can be your master copy of the image.  You can always export a copy of it as a jpeg from the Organiser to a folder for emailing, uploading to online somewhere or whatever.  If you keep a PSD and jpeg copy of an image, the jpeg copy is in reality redundant because you can always make a jpeg copy from the master PSD file.

Hope this helps