There are 2 HP scanners at the Digital Arts Workstation in the Redwood Room. At this time, there is no slide scanner available.
Scanning with Photoshop:
1. Turn on the scanner: The power switch is on the front right hand side of the scanner. The green "power" and "ready" lights on the front of the scanner will glow when it is turned on.
2. Launch Photoshop: Click the icon on the desktop to open Adobe Photoshop 7.0. Photoshop will start up. Now, place the object you wish to scan on the glass of the scanner. The item should be against the bottom edge of the glass.
3. Access the scanning software: In Photoshop, pull down the File menu and select Import. Select SilverFast (Umax-SF) from the submenu that appears.
4. Set the Scan type: 42-24 Bit Color is the default option for scanning color items. It is good for regular positive color picture, photos, and documents. 14-8 bit Grayscale option is for scanning grayscale images such as B/W Photos. 1 bit Line arts option is for scanning black and white line drawings.
5. Choose Output Resolution: Choose the dpi from the pull down menu. The dpi (or dots per inch) determine the quality and file size of the image. The higher the dpi, the higher the image quality, however, high resolutions produces larger files and slower scans. 72 dpi should be used for images intended for the web; 150-300 dpi for standard printing. 600 dpi for slides.
6. Decide the Scanning mode: In the General tab, use the Original field to select whether you want to scan reflective (e.g. regular photos, drawings) or transparency (e.g. films, x-rays) images.
7. Scan and save the image: Hit the Scan button and the image will be scanned and imported into Photoshop. Use Photoshop to adjust the image as needed. Then go to File/Save as... option.
About the image format:
TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format: A bit-mapped graphic file format developed by Aldus and Microsoft. This format provides lossless image-storage. No information is discarded when data is stored compressed or uncompressed. As a result file sizes are large. Web browsers do not commonly support TIFF. High-fidelity image-storage with TIFF is preferential for images that require high detail.
JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group compression type: Compressed file format that discards similar data in an image. The range of discarded data can be set with JPEG's compression option for quality on a scale from 1-10 (Low/Minimum-High/Maximum). The lower the quality the smaller the file size. With increased image quality, the file size increases as well. JPEG provides a versatile format for image-storage and is the most widely used format on the web.
For detailed information about Image File formats, please check on Microsoft's MSDN Library, Adobe's TIFF and JPEG Technical Specification.
, October 1, 2009