INLAND MARINE RADIO HISTORY ARCHIVE                            
            Printer Friendly(0.7" L&R Margins) Scanning/Copying Tips

(1) On thinner paper, keep any material on the back from showing through on the 
front when it is scanned/copied by backing up the reverse side with a dark sheet.

(2) Don't worry about getting the pictures perfectly straight or exactly sized, and 
there is no need to straighten, crop, optimize, etc. after scanning.  While I can't 
get rid of the patterns noted in #7 I can optimize as required to get good quality.

(3) The aim is to put 8" wide pictures on the site.  This means that slides need to 
be scanned at 1200 DPI so that when enlarged they will give a clean 8" image. 
Please set the scanner image size adjustments to capture only a little more than 
the active area of the slide not the whole cardboard holder.

(4) To get the best quality at the desired 8" size large photos (8" x 10") should 
be scanned at 200-300 DPI, but smaller ones must be scanned at increasingly higher 
DPI up to 800 for the smallest photos.  

(5) Scans of gloss finished images are much better than those from matte finish.

(6) For non-multi-color images set the scanner for greyscale scanning not color.  

(7) Most scanners have a descreening function which will minimize the patterns  
which often show up when printed images are scanned. These images are screen  
printed - usually at 55 to 120 dots per inch (DPI). To determine the descreening 
DPI to use, do a test scan of a 1" by 2" portion of a light (but not white) area of 
the image (with no descreening) at either 720 or 960 DPI depending on whether your 
monitor is a 72 or 96 DPI one.  Display this test image at the 100% size setting. 
Hold a ruler up to the monitor and count the number of dots in 1".  Multiply the 
number found by 10 to get the descreening DPI number.  Do the final scan of the 
full image at a multiple (4 is good) of the descreening number. Thus for images 
printed at 65 DPI one would set the descreening for 65 DPI and scan at 260 DPI.

(8) I can work with positive or negative images in these file formats: 
    .PNG gives the highest quality - Preferred, but the files are large
    .TIF also gives the highest quality but the files are larger than .PNG
    .TIF with  lossless LZW compression often brings the file size way down
    .JPG -  please use the 90% quality setting (10% compression) setting
    .GIF - use for text  and line drawings, but not for photos.

(9) If you have a high-speed Internet connection you can send files as attachments 
to e-mails up to a limit of about 5 MB per e-mail.  Another way is to put the image 
files on a data CD and send it in the mail. Caption and date information for the 
images should be put in a text file and sent along with them.  I can read, text 
(.TXT), Rich Text (.RTF) and Microsoft Word (.DOC) files.  My e-mail is: archivist-
1@imradioha.org and my address is: Tom McKee, 104 Water Leaf Lane, Cary, NC 27518

(10) As an alternative to #(9) you can send the original material to me in the mail 
and I will do the scanning and return the material to you along with high quality 
electronic versions on a data CD.

(11) A great freeware image conversion and manipulation program for PCs is  
IrfanView: http://www.irfanview.com. It does a zillion image related things  
including saving .TIF files with the lossless LZW compression mentioned in #(8).

Thank you for your help with this project             T.A.M. - Revised 03/31/08