Increasingly, however, many people want to scan their negatives, slides, prints and documents and store them successfully on their computer or on CD or DVD. So I am covering this topic in a little more detail here.
There are also people who may wish to send their pictures in digital form by email or on a CD to a magazine for publication whether taken on a digital camera or a film camera. Many magazines have specific requirements on the size and format of file size and dare I say it– resolution!
Equally there are many people who wish to scan line drawings, illustrations or pictures for use in a publication, say Microsoft Word or Publisher and so on. If you don’t know all the wrinkles and twists, this can be at least difficult or at the worst- infuriating! I know - I have been there!
For the average person, the thought of transferring hundreds or even thousands of pictures or documents to a digital format is a daunting one. However, if you set yourself a target of say one complete film or twenty documents per week it does not become such an irksome task.
If you set out to try and transfer everything in one mammoth task, you will most likely get rapidly disenchanted and give up. So set a weekly or monthly target and try and keep to it. It is remarkable how much you can achieve over a relatively short period of time.
In order to manipulate your scanned images, you will need an image processing programme to carry out certain operations like image resizing. In this book I have used Photoshop Elements throughout to illustrate these. This is the most popular software but the procedures are very similar in most image editing software.
I have tried to address all these problems and issues head on and this discussion will, hopefully, assist the reader to avoid the many pitfalls and problems associated with this subject.