Suggestions Wanted For Scanning Album Pages For SCF

Hi All - I would like to start scanning and posting album pages of stamps to the Forum and would appreciate input as to what settings to use in order to meet the JPEG limits of SCF and still have the page image be useful.

Thank you in advance for your help.

I scan a Steiner Page at 200dpi, which presents nicely on my computer, and the size is manageable.

A full page with lots of coloured stamps will often require optimising
(ballpark full scale 360Kb then optimised down to 200 )

I have always recommended VueScan Pro for anyone who scans more than 30 pages per month. This app has a lot of things to recommend it including support for older scanners (even when the operating system does not), batch processing of scans and saves, saving of scanner calibration profiles, etc. I particularly like the ability to scan with a single key stroke; you can scan a page, remove the page from the scanner and replace, hit the enter button, repeat over and over (no extra mouse clicks). You can configure it to save with incremental numbered file names, this is perfect for scanning books (to keep the page number in sync with saved files names). The time I save each month more than covers the cost of this quality application.

It also support saving in various jpg qualities, so if you scan an entire color page (8.5x11) at 150 dpi and save at 75% quality, the resulting file will upload to SCF without additional processing. Of course this depends upon how much color there is on the page but here is an example at these settings. Scanned and uploaded in one step.


Don

I'm with rod222, but I scan my pages at 300dpi then reduce them until I can upload them.

Thank you Rod and Don. I might use the "Testing" topic here on SCF to see how it goes.

I scan with my native scanner program on my mac at 150dpi, and the file sizes have been in range. I manipulate the files in photoshop if necessary.

With all the stamps you've been getting lately, I can't wait to see some of the pages. No matter how you end up doing it :)

Why do some images (like Don's) have a bluish tint? This seems intentional by forum software.

Is there a really basic tutorial anywhere on the site regarding scanning? I've looked and have not found one. As in, what is dpi, what is "right-sizing," etc.; yes, that sort of basic. I know what apps are (Vue Scan Pro ??), but have not downloaded any to either my desktop or my smart phone.

People have asked in the past to see items from my collections that I reference, but the knowledge of how to do that is lacking.

I have a scanner on my printer that I've not used. There are some instructions contained in my downloaded manual. But, my experience with scanning is to take documents or pictures to my local UPS store and make high quality photocopies on their high speed copier. Staff then scans in those images and sends to my home computer, via e-mail, and they arrive as pdf files. Thanks.

I use 3rd party hosting which allows me to scan @ 1200DPI then insert into post which give the right amount of detail. Flickr, Imageshack, and photobucket are the 3 I use and I'd say I like Flickr the best. They do have a scan limit for the free hosting and I've now hit the point where I need to upgrade to their next version but cost is minimal. For full page scans I scan @ 600 DPI.

There is 'Digital Imaging' article on Stamp Smarter http://stampsmarter.com/features/Color_Images.html

The SCF instructions are here https://www.stampcommunity.org/sc_t...g_images.asp

SCF member Partime (Steve Rust) was kind enough to write a tutorial a few months ago and I converted it to html, but it has not yet been uploaded here (on SCF server). But since you asked, I uploaded it to the Stamp Smarter server for now. It is here http://stampsmarter.com/Learning/SCF/help1.html

Don

RE: 3rd party hosting
I highly recommend NOT linking images on a 3rd party hosting site. Frankly if I owned SCF I would completely disallow it. This can quickly turn into, as we painfully saw with Photobucket, a fiasco. I know for sure that Litho has spent at least 20 man hours trying to go back and fix all the broken image links in the Engraving category over the last few weeks.

At any time a 3rd party image host can change their Terms and Conditions and break all the threads and posts we have in this community making them virtually useless. First choice is always to upload your images to this site.
Don

Thanks, Don. I'll take a look over the upcoming weekend. Steve

I hope that tutorial is helpful to some. I still use the same steps, and works well every time.

All of this information has been very helpful and I hope to start posting album pages soon. My wife could care less about my albums, my dogs are bored with them because they do not squeak, my cats eye them with suspicion and there are no kids at home to feign interest. I tried showing random people on the street but they ran away shouting "police!".

I'm scanning my pages at 600dpi, but it is just my habit of minimum resolution from doing genealogy photo archiving. The reason I am scanning is to combine and create digital albums in PDF as an archive record. But first I crop and save an image jpg of each stamp for archiving as well. I use the images for creating new album pages when required.

I know this is a storage hog, but it is small compared to my genealogy archive storage files.