Home Scanning Tips - 5

If you've been following our little collection of home photograph scanning tips, then thank you for your interest. We hope you've found them useful.

Our last tip (for now) features cropping - when to crop, when not to crop, particularly if you're intending to use your scan for a photo gift order. However, many of the tips and guidelines still apply.

Tip 5 - Crop your scan to the image itself.
We do receive some images where the whole scanner bed is the image. At Fabulous Photo Gifts, we hand check every order photograph and crop etc where required, however some more automated companies might 'print what they get' and you would end up with a mousemat etc with a postage stamp size actual image surrounded by lots of white!

Try to scan your image squarely.
No we don't mean we only accept square scans! What we mean is try to line your print up with the horizontal and vertical guides on the scanner bed. This will reduce your file size and help us to process your order that little bit quicker.

Don't crop the scan.
Don't be tempted to crop your scanned image as we never 'stretch to fit'. If there is a particular area of a scanned photo you want omitting or want the gift centered on, then just email us after placing your order (or make notes in the checkout comments section) and we'll do our very best to help.

Better to have too much image to work with than not enough.

Well that just about covers it for now. We'll probably add to the series later but if there's a particular topic or question you'd like answering, then just leave a comment to this post and Fabulous Photo Gifts will try to answer it.

To jump to Home Scanning Tip 3 & 4 - Click here

Home Scanning Tips - Tip 3 and 4

Home Scanning Tips - Numbers 3 and 4

As number 3 is just a short one, I've posted tip 4 as well. Common sense? Well yes probably but you'd be amazed how many people never do carry out the two tips below that deal with image quality.

Tip 3. View your scan at print size.
This will help show up any flaws in the scan or quality of the original photograph.

Tip 4. Clean the scanner plate and the print you're intending to scan before you start. Sounds obvious but you'd be amazed at the number of scanned images we receive where the dust is visible in the pre-production and sometimes the finished photo gift.

There will be more tips later this week.

To jump to Home Scanning Tip 2 - Click here

Home Photograph Scanning Tips - Number 1

Scanners for transferring photographs and other printed materials into your computer are becomimg better and better with each new generation or model launch and home scanning is still big business although expected to decline as more and more of us get into digital photography.

Old photo's make great subject matter for personalising photo gifts with and we see quite a few order uploads involving home scanned photographs, sometimes with not the best results.

It's worth reminding you that Fabulous Photo Gifts does offer a free professional scanning service (maximum size A4) as part of any order made via the post. However, as most home scanners are perfectly capable of producing a decent quality scan, here are a few tips.

Scan at 300dpi.
If you have the option, then always scan at 300 dpi. Don't worry about file size at this point as you can always reduce the dpi gradually if your final scan is over the 10Mb upload limit.

72dpi scans usually result in smaller file sizes which don't resize to well as so much original information is lost in the scan.

We'll be publishing more home scanning tips throughout the next couple of weeks so remember to re-visit. Alternatively, why not subscribe to our RSS Feed which will alert you when a new tip is published?