scanner help???

[jadey]

hmmm i think ive figured out how to scan...its not exactly as hard as i thought. But what would like PERFECT measurements look like? In terms of measurements i mean in terns of the dpi thing and the out put size. Ive been scanning my color pics at about 400 sometimes 500 dpi and having the output size at 40%. But the pics still look too big and the color doesnt seem that great. Now i know my scanner can scan alot more dpi than i set it for (cant remember how much) does it really make that much of difference in the color??

also i think for a wallpaper the the pixil size is like 1200x800 (?) but whats the resoltions set at ? because the higher i raiser the dpi the more pixels there are in terms of choosing a size.

so to summarize to an easy question. What are the average or basic values for a scanning a color (very detailed) picture?

edit: oohh finally my new ava kicked in..took forever to register. hehe its one of my pics ^_^ i love my devil's child scanner

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ August 05, 2003 01:09 AM: Message edited by: jadey ]</font>

[Risu-chan]

It depends on if you're talking about the ideal resolution for print or for screen.

Screen resolution is 72 DPI (which is why most screen-res pictures look horrible when printed).

GOOD printer resolution is 1200 DPI (sometimes higher for art books). Average printer resolution is 300 DPI (which is still better than anything you can get off a screen without scaling down at a multiple of 72 to increase the pixel density to something closer to that).

Anyway, if you're looking for ideal resolutions for screen, figure out how many pixels you're going to need for that size, and scan your image at something that approximately divides by 75 or 100 (the nearest easily-divisible-into-even-units neighbors of 72) to get to that resolution.

Pulling numbers out of the air, say your starting image is 2x2 inches and you want it to end up at approximately 800x800 screen res. If you scan at 450 DPI, you'll end up with 900x900 pixels from that starting-out 2x2 image. Then to get it from 2x2@450 to 900x900@screen-res, tell Photoshop to rescale the image to 75 DPI WITHOUT resampling it so it just changes the pixel density and you keep the same 900x900 pixels you started out with. (The less resampling you have to do, the better the final image quality will be...)

[jadey]

oh wow that clears alot up!! it never clicked in my head that the dpi times the length and width of the pic was what the pixil measurments would be... shoulda been obvious but oh well.
thank you !! ^_^ up till now ive just been picking random munbers really and hoping for the best.