Newbie Setting Help Requested.

[kola]

Hi everyone,

I have just bought a Plustek OpticBook 3600 to back up many of my aging mags that have great sentimental value.

This scanner is superb and takes as much pain as poss out of scanning.

I want the best results I can, only want to scan everything once. Have my settings as follows

DPI = 600

File = TIFF

Now I know from working with images before a TIFF is an uncompressed format and 600 dpi better than 300 dpi but the file sizes are huuuuuuge. 80 meg for a page is going to get out of hand by the time I have scanned 5 mags. Thats 13 pages to a gig!!

So, what are the minimum setting for a sentimental fool like me? I can use 600 or 300 dpi and can use Jpeg, BMP, TIFF or PNG.

Please can someone advise me here. I want the best scans I can get at a smaller size. I understand Jpeg sacrifices quality for compression as does MP3, as long as its not too noticeable I will be happy.

Any advice greatly appreciated,

[triverse]

Hello, and welcome. It is always great to have another member that is willing to help in any way possible.

Your scanner settings are quite high, as you can see from your file sizes that you are getting. I personally use a 300 DPI on my scanner and save it at a maximum quality setting JPG. That results in a file that is about 5 to 10 megs big (depending on what is on the page). That is not unreasonable. I have tried saving as a TIFF but gave up on that after not being able to tell a difference in the quality and seeing the file sizes were about 4 times bigger (plus they would take upwards of a minute to apply final edits in Gimp).

So in short, keep it at 300 DPI on your scanner and just save at Maximum Quality (may be called something different in your software-I am using a Lexmark).

When editing your pics is when you can make addition changes to the final image, such as if your scan is crooked a little, you can straighten it here.

The settings we are going for here are 1440 on the width (your raw scan will be something like 2600+ wide). Saving at a quality setting of 90 in Gimp, or 9 in Photoshop drops the file size down to about a meg per page and looks great.

If you have any more questions just post and ask away, someone will help.

[kola]

Hey thanks for the reply.

I have set my scanner to 300dpi now but cant set the quality of the Jpeg :/

Im using the software that came with the scanner. It has some great features like auto rotate so when you scan one side of the mag it flips the next scan 180 degrees automatically. Saves alot of time.

The size like you say are huge too. Cant seem to edit that either, there just a set size depending on whether 300 or 600 dpi.

I prefer Fireworks to photoshop so may see if there is some batch processing there and Ill drop a full mag on it to hopefully re-size them all with one press. Still in the tiff format I can them compress them to 100% Jpeg as I know FW can do this.

Thanks for the help, Ill keep you posted

:]

EDIT - Patch processing to 60% size of the original tiff got an entire mag down to under a gig - excellent :} Batch processing is a couple of clicks to do a whole mag to in FW. Not sure about other software's but FW is easy enough if anyone is looking for something to do this.

EIDT2: - And then batch process Jpegging at 100% gets the full mag down to half a gig. Superb!!

Edited April 17, 2009 by kola

[kbf_private_joker]

Glad to see you are interested in helping!

Do us a favor and upload a few sample scans to this thread so we can give some advice on how to tweak for the best quality. Every scanner is different and some settings for one person might not be quite right for another.

[triverse]

Glad to see you are interested in helping!

Do us a favor and upload a few sample scans to this thread so we can give some advice on how to tweak for the best quality. Every scanner is different and some settings for one person might not be quite right for another.

Yes, kbf is right, I should have asked you to upload a couple of shots to see what you are outputting first. Been a rough couple days.

You should be able to change the quality of the JPG when you save it (but you are using TIFF so it doesn't matter right now).