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Help Again

Bob Davis

Bob Davis
I have not only discovered my Birmingham postcards, but also 4 old b& w photos I took of the demolition for the ring road way back in the late fifties. As some of the postcards are Edwardian and actually dated by the senders and there are one or two other vintage cards, I thought instead of my holiday. I would bore you stiff with them. The question is what of the magic letters do I scan them in on and how so as they do not end up as thumbprints do I get them a good size on the post, like as what you experts ,do The magic letters on my HP Envy all singing, all dancing, copy, scan, fax, dishwash, toast and make tea machine are JPEG, PDF and one or two others. Please let me know so that I can excite you all with the card of Bromford Lane. There is in the postcard world a group of us who look at the worlds most boring postcards and Bromford Lane has shot up the list for the No 1 position. The Holiday Inn Bromsgrove have just rung to remind me that my booking for tomorrow has been cancelled. Salt in wounds.

Bob
 
Bob,
The thing to do is scan them and set the output to jpg which is short for jpeg. Don't use PDFs. Have a look at the forum instructions below and have a go at uploading in this thread which you have started.
We will watch and eventually turn you into an expert photo uploader like what we are ... :grinning:
 
Photos are JPEG files. That is about the limit of my knowledge.

SOME photos are JPG / JPEG files, however there are many image formats.

A new format that is slowly replacing JPG as it is designed for the internet is PNG.

However JPG will be fine as it is a long standing format supported by all image programs.
 
I find those PNG are a bit of a pain, I get them sent to me from mobile phones to print out for a friend, nowhere near as easy as the jpg format.
 
PNG is an acronym for Portable Network Graphics and is lossless when saved. I use them when I do a lot of photo editing and have to keep opening and saving before I finally convert to jpg files.
I notice when I do a full screenshot with Win 10 it results in a png file. The forum will accept png format uploads but the files are always larger.
 
For me, Bob, the basic principle is to get the image scanned in high definition and transferred into the PC before I do anything else.It doesn’t matter if the file size is huge at that stage, just as long as you have got out of the original image absolutely every detail which is within it And it is all safely stored within the computer.

Once it is in the machine, you can then manipulate It to make it suitable for your eventual purpose. Any graphics software will do the job. I use Photo Elements and have got used to getting out of it what I want. It will probably vary a bit depending on the exact program but the end result will be the same.

What I want is a tidy image, suitably cropped and adjusted as necessary with regard to brightness, contrast, colour and so on. But still containing all the detail of the original – I don’t know when I might want all that at some stage in the future.

Ptoducing/posting a version of this to the Forum (or any other online destination like a website) then becomes a balance between the file size (which can’t be too huge) and the definition (which you don’t want to reduce any more than necessary). When posting to the forum I find that a image width of 700 to 1000 pixels gives a sensible size if uploaded and inserted as a full-size image. With a bit of luck the file size will often work out at, say, around 300/400 kb. If it doesn’t, and if the file is much bigger than that, I reduce the image width accordingly. There is no hard and fast rule about how big an image (in terms of file size, not image size,) it is possible or sensible to upload to the Forum But I imagine that we always have to keep an eye on Forum capacity and I start to feel a bit uncomfortable if I upload anything bigger than the numbers I’ve mentioned.

Keep it simple, just get it scanned and into the PC rather than trying to understand all the fancy options which the printer offers, fiddle with it there, and use JPEG!

Nothing official, or possibly even correct, about the above. It’s just what works for me.

Chris
 
I should have added that Elements gives you the opportunity to “Save for Web”. This gives a version of the scanned image with a width which you can specify and an automatically reduced file size.

Chris
 
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