Thanks to everyone who put in their 2 cents worth on my photo
dilemma. I forwarded a message Dave sent to my graphics girl (the
one who didn’t want me to scan my work) (did graphic design for
NASA before starting her own business). She had the following to
throw in I thought was interesting:
Coolio! This guy sounds pretty interesting! Thanks for the heads
up. Glad to hear that someone can explain why the flatbed
scanning isn’t a hot idea… only thing I could do was to
promise you that the scans would look reeeeally terrible… Dave
put my thoughts into words!
Who asked him about scanning at 4000 dpi?? Not sure if I’ve ever
known anyone who’s ever scanned at that high a res! He is right
about something else too- scanning at a higher res (say about 200
dpi- or so) and then cropping down or resizing first the physical
size and then the file size (to 72 dpi) is the best way to go.
Any manipulation or cleaning up (removing dust, etc. from the
scanned neg. or adjusting color of the file) should be done at a
higher resolution. And actually I didn’t even know that you
COULD save at a higher resolution than 72 dpi to save as “gif” or
"jpeg" … the only formats the www accepts.
Just don’t let this info confuse you- to do any print work- you
NEED high res files- at about 300 dpi or thereabouts at the
physical size it’s going to be. That’s the only reason I
recommended you getting the higher res files whatever way you get
them (the cd will be perfect)… so that in CASE you want to use
any of the photographs for print work of any kind, you’ve got the
high res file right there to work with. (And you’re also able to
clean up the files and then scale them down to be dropped on the
web.) If you’re up to doing your own work (for the web, I mean)
you should do just what he’s suggesting… the photo cd thing.
Unless you want to scan the photo prints yourself (his other
suggestion) but that’s more time consuming and will most likely
involve more adjusting after the scan’s done.