Regarding scanning
 

Okay, the vast majority of my photos are "old school" - film prints:-) (Didn't get on the digital bandwagon early enough) - so I am scanning photos. Any tips or anything important I should know? (I did at least figure out how to scan a group and then separate them in Elements - woo hoo! I may get the hang of this yet!)

I wish I had some for you, but I have yet to scan in any of my photos. One of these days I will have to start that project, I think I need to finish getting the 100 gigs of digital pics orginized and backed up first!

make sure your scanner bed is lint free and clean...and make sure your settings are set at a high resolution..I scan at a minimum of 300 dpi....

there are services online that will scan a shoebox full of photos for a flat fee and do a good job...for about $99 I haven't used them yet as I've been digital since 1998, but know others that have with good success....you may want to consider that as well.. they have high quality scanners and put it all to CD for you and you get it back fairly fast. I'll have to look for the name of the company if anyone is interested.

One thing I like to do when scanning is just what Anita said and scan in 300, but then I right click on the photo in Windows Explorer and click Properties then add any details like notes that are on the back of photos, dates, who's in it, etc to that Properties file. That way I don't forget. Almost everyone used to write on the back of photos before we knew better! ;)

I've been scanning a lot of photos lately (I've stolen a lot of old pics from my mother and MIL) and I've been scanning all of them at 480 - 600 psi so that they are large enough to crop or work with for layouts. This is really helpful if the photos are really small. I also just plan to play with the photo in Photoshop before putting it in a layout (usually I take out dust/scratches and make sure the colors are bright and sharp.

That's one heck of an idea, it would never have occurred to me. Thanks for such a great tip!

I'm scanning some old photos myself. I was scanning it at 800 dpi because I don't know if there will come a time when I want them bigger. What's the largest size you can print out for 300 dpi? Thank you.

Depends on what size the photo is. You can probably double the size of the scanned photo for an OK print at 300 dpi. That would make the effective dpi of the enlargement 150 dpi, and to me that's a bare minimum. If you want to be able to do an 8 x 10 or 11 x 16 from a 4 x 6 photo, go up to 600 dpi on the scan. Just my opinion. Some others may disagree. You should experiment using your own equipment and whatever print method you use and do one enlargement--not a tremendous investment if it's not a good result.

Thanks donakat. I'll try that. I do have some coupons from Artscow I could use for "experimenting."

I did not know that you could change the scanning settings. I'll have to look into that.

Now back to the first post... how do you scan several pics and then separate them on elements?