Using Low Cost Scanning For Your Digital Scrapbook

Posted by | Posted on 1:55 AM

By Pete Fontaine

Digital Scrapbooking is the hugely popular art of turning your precious photographic memories into beautiful personalized creations. And the good news is that the net is loaded with free and inexpensive tutorials, creation software, and community. You will never be at a loss for creative ideas, new and innovative tools, layouts, and templates.

Restricting yourself to using just your digital photographs is no longer necessary. You can add hundreds of your older photos to your digital photo gallery for as little as 5 cents each. By sending your pictures to an inexpensive scanning service you can fill in those missing decades in your digital scrapbooks.

Perhaps an even greater benefit of scanning your photos than making them available for your digital scrapbook is protecting them from possible destruction or damage. When a scanning service saves your photos to a DVD it makes it possible to store a duplicate in two or three different locations. This insures their permanent survival, protecting your photographs from natural deterioration and damage from mold and moisture. Scanning to a DVD also allows you to share a set of your pictures with others.

If you've ever wanted to build a photobook or upload your photos to a photo sharing site then you'll have an additional benefit to scanning photos for your scrapbook. Want to build a slideshow to view on TV? You can do it online or buy inexpensive software. You can even add your own music. Want to create a T-shirt with a crazy photo on it? Just search "photo t-shirt". It's that easy!

Make sure your photo scanning service will scan at 300 dpi. No more, no less. 300 DPI is the best choice for almost all photo scanning purposes, so don't pay for more. Also make sure that your photos are saved as a high quality jpeg. You will be using jpeg files in your scrapbooking efforts, and though high quality jpegs have bigger files, you can always use your photo editing software to reduce the file size for a copy of the original.

Find a photo scanner who offers an inexpensive photo enhancement service. These services can make descent improvements to most of your photos. Don't pay a lot for this because it won't perform miracles, and it won't fix all of the problems. But beware; always enhance a copy of your original scans. Don't let a photo scanner send just the enhanced scans. Photo enhancement as well as any manipulation or rotation of your scans means they will be recompressed. Repeated recompression means loss of image quality.

The web is loaded with digital scrapbooking accessories, communities, and educational materials. You can find e-books and embellishments of every kind. Put these tools together with scans from an economical photo scanning service and you're on your way!

About the Author:

Comments (0)