MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
With my brothers wedding coming very swiftly at the moment, one plan is to get old family photos and scan them in as part of a power point running in the background of the speech.
However, not sure the best way to scan these in. Concerned that if I scan them in at work onto a PDF, then the quality will be very poor by the time I get them onto the power point. Any ideas how to do this differently?
I just put them flat under a piece of glass and take a photo with a digital camera. Quality is pretty close to the original (which is usually pretty poor) but fine for this sort of thing
Does your work scanner not scan to tiff or some other nice picture format?
Just take a digital photo. The pixels on your modern phone will be finer than the pixels on an older digital print or the grain on a photo.
Just done it for granny's funeral and it worked well. By the way I got some blown up by Pics2posters.co.uk and the results are excellent. Just send them as jpegs.
Your work scanner should do TIFF or JPG as well as PDF.
Failing that, flatbed scanners are pretty cheap on eBay - not unusual to get them for less than £20.
(I have 3 at home that I bought in a jumble sale for less than a fiver!)
thanks guys, may well try the phone option and see how that goes.
Just get good strong north light, not direct sunlight, and be sure there aren't any reflections.
Just get good strong north light, not direct sunlight, and be sure there aren't any reflections.
This. Many printers offer a print capability, and enable a series of photos to be set up on the platen, a pre-scan done and individual photos selected scanned and cropped, the benefit being the photos will be held flat against the glass.
The only issue is that many gloss prints, when placed on the glass, form dark patches, or coloured rings, called moire patterns, which are actually interference patterns caused by two shiny surfaces in direct contact, and which is difficult to avoid, the only answer usually is to get a can of hairspray, shoot some into the air, then waft the photos through it; it gives a rough but transparent coating that stops the patterns forming.
A sheet of glass holding the photos down is difficult with a camera, due to reflections of the camera in the glass; a possibility would be to blutac the photos to a flat surface, then taking the photos with the board or whatever propped upright, so you can get a better view and get things square.