35 How do I scan photos & piccys so they look great?
Description
This article is from the Australia Motorcycles FAQ, by Cameron Simpson cs@zip.com.au with numerous contributions by others.
35 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 the size
attributes of the IMG tag to include a resized-very-small inline image
of the original simply by pointing at it. This is bad, as the whole
original is downloaded by the browser and only then resized. So the
page takes forever to load anyway. Use GIFs for the thumbnails,
quantised to few colours (i.e. 16, 32 or 64 instead of the default
close-to-256); you'll get good compression this way, better than JPEG
for thumbnail-sized images.
Tools I use
im2html
http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/im2html/
for my image galleries. You just throw the images into a
directory and run the script. You can use the thumbnail
script supplied with it standalone if you want the
thumbnails but prefer a different web page layout scheme.
Anyone got other good tools?
Continue to:
My Books
