How to scan photos

If your images are non-digital photos or illustrated art, they need to be scanned before they can be placed into your book. Scanning turns your artwork into a digital format. Here’s how to scan photos and get the best results.

Scan your images at their original size. If you are trying to enlarge a small image, increase the resolution.

If you are saving the scanned file as a JPEG, make sure you choose the maximum image quality, but minimum compression. The lower the compression, higher the quality of the image.

As a rule, images saved as jpeg are best for web use. Such images can be scanned at 100 to 150 dpi. If you intend your image to be used within a book, save it as a jpeg at 300 to 400 dpi. However, images saved as jpegs are typically not of the highest quality. The format best for book design is the TIFF format, at which you can scan images at 200 to 300 dpi. Ensure when saving with the TIFF format that you do not compress the image.

If you are using black and white photos as illustrations, you should scan them at 300 dpi and save them in TIFF format with no compression.

Why CMYK?

Color photos and images can be scanned initially in RGB color (at 300 dpi) but will need to be converted into CMYK color mode before they can be used in your book. The scanned image can be converted from the RGB mode to a CMYK mode using photo-editing software such as Photoshop.

Any color image can be created with the mixture of three main colors – red, green and blue (RGB) or of four main colors – cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). While computer screens are better suited to displaying the RGB color images, printing presses use CMYK since it gives them much more flexibility in printing color images. A printing press uses four sources of ink containing CMYK to print high quality color photos or illustrations. If you are inserting images to be printed in a printing press, you should include images that are in the CMYK mode.

GoodBooks can help you prepare your images so they can be printed efficiently. Contact us here.

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