Digital Scrapbooks and More Blog

by Cheri Barlow

I just returned from a wonderful family event – my parent’s 50th Wedding Anniversary Party! I had a great time and I think my parents did too. We had most the family there; my parents had all their four children and their spouses, plus 14 of their grandchildren and a few spouses of grandchildren to! So, with that kind of crowd it was quite a big and wonderful party! During the celebration we were very excited about the original photo of my mom and dad’s wedding day. It seems like during these types of events that these long lost photos seem to surface.  So being a fellow digital scrapbooker, I wanted to scan this old photo so that my girls could have a copy of this special photo, and I wanted a digital copy for  future digital scrapbooking projects as well.

I was excited to begin scanning this precious treasure, but as I began to scan it, I got thinking about how I might upload this scanned photo onto our blog or Website, send it in a email, or even print it out at home or upload it to a professional printing company. I realized how the resolution of a scanned photo needs to be set differently if it is to be used on the web, rather than printed! We wrote an article on "The Basics of Scanning a Photo" (click here to read that article about scanning), but this special photo really reminded me about the importance of setting the scanner’s resolution depending on how you want to use the photo! Sometimes it is hard to find this setting and using the default setting might not give you the results you wanted or even expected!

So, as you gather more photos from albums to scan for digital scrapbooking projects it is important to know how to scan into Photoshop® Elements 6 and also important to know how to set the resolution. The great part about scanning photos into Photoshop Elements is that you can adjust the resolution, fix the photo, alter it, apply filters or use the other special features that PSE 6 has built into the program, and then save it into several other file formats to use in a variety of projects.

Here is the information to save your photo treasures. To scan a photo into Photoshop® Elements 6, first, start in Editor Mode, then go to File > Import > (your Scanner/Printer).  You may have several options to choose from, and your scanner may be listed twice. Choose your scanner’s name without the "Twain" (or "TW" option) after the name. This pulls up the Photoshop® Elements pop-up menu.

 Next, when the pop-up menu appears, click on the blue underlined sentence that says "Adjust the quality of the scanned picture" towards the bottom of this pop-up menu (see red #1). Once you have clicked on this blue sentence link, then another pop-up menu comes up(see #2). Now, you can adjust the resolution here.

HOT TIP: The resolution for a scanned photo for printing should be set between 200-300 dpi. The resolution for a photo that you want to use on the Web, or to email or for computer viewing (other examples: uploading to MySpace or Facebook) should be set between 72 -100 dpi.  If you only have time for one scan then scan for print quality as you can always change the resolution to lower quality in PSE — but not the other way — in other words,  low quality to high quality doesn’t work!!!!

Once I set the resolution for my parents Wedding photo,  I scanned the photo for both a Web version (my resolution setting was at 72 dpi) and Print version (my resolution setting was set at 300 dpi). I then saved each scanned photo in the JPEG format. That way I could give my daughters a copy of both versions so they could use as they liked in whatever project they might use the photo in.

Try using this scanning tip for your own photos! When attending family events, catching up with old friends, visiting Grandparents … see how many old photos surface and scan them to use for digital scrapbooking projects.

Enjoy!

Cheri

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