Homes for sale and homes for rent UK

Scanning Tips

A high quality photograph is best scanned at 150dpi 24 bit True Colour. Do not be tempted to scan any higher than this for web page photos, you will simply land up with a photo much larger in size than you need.

Once the scan has been completed, make any alterations to the image that are necessary - Brightness, Contrast, Sharpness etc. To be on the safe side you should also Rescale / Resize the photo. You will find all these tools in your 'Photo Editor' programme. Ideally you should aim to 'Rescale' the photo to somewhere around 600 pixels x 400 pixels.

Once the photo has been adjusted and rescaled and you are happy with the way it looks, click on your File Menu and click on 'Save As'. You should then save the file as a .jpg or .jpeg file. Both these formats offer excellent compression, which dramatically reduces the size of the file. (A file size of around 600 pixels x 400 pixels will be compressed to well under 50Kb.)

The downside of .jpg and .jpeg formats is that each time you amend and save a jpeg, they loose a little more detail, to the point that they become so degraded that they look terrible. So that is why you should make sure that you do all the alterations and adjustments to them in a different format (Tif, Tiff or Bitmap) and once that has been completed, then save them as .jpg or .jpeg.
N.B. Tif, Tiff and Bitmap formats do not degrade during alterations, but have VERY large file sizes - not popular on web pages.

When saving the file as a .jpg or .jpeg, you are offered a degree of compression, normally from 1 to 100. 1 being hardly any compression  and 100 being the maximum compression. The higher the compression the smaller the file size, but also the lower the quality. You will often find the settings behind an 'Options' button during the save as procedure. Try the setting at around 35%.

Once you have saved the photo in the .jpg or .jpeg format, check that the file size is below 50Kb. We do not accept any files larger than 50Kb. If you try to send a file larger than 50Kb, our system will reject it, asking you to reduce the file size and try again.

NOTES:  

1) If you are still having trouble a useful tool to use is the jpeg Optimiser  from XAT.Com. This compresses jpeg images quickly and easily. You can get a free download from their site XAT.com.

2) If you would like more information on image file formats, scanning and printing visit: http://www.hp-photoworld.com
Once there, click on Tips and Tools and then Tips and Tricks.