How do I scan photos & piccys so they look great?
The trick in my experience is to not scan at too high a resolution. If my original is large enough, I will scan at 75dpi in 24 bit. Any higher and you pick up the texture of the paper and it looks all speckled. If the original is small and you’d like to try and enlarge it then try scanning at higher resolutions. Always scan at more than you’ll want to put on your page (i.e. at the maximum res you can without showing the grain). Keep the originals (on your home machine, on a tape, whatever) and post resized (smaller) ones to your web site if you have bandwidth or storage costs. Image format? Avoid wasteful image formats like TIFF or BMP (neither has any compression). Choose JPEG format usually. Avoid GIFs for full size images – the colour quantisation ruins the image (but see thumbnailing, below).. Indexing? Don’t include the full-size pic in your page. Include thumbnails and attach HREFs to the full-size pic to the thumbnail. Do make real thumbnails. Novice web authors sometimes use th
