I’ve been doing some new year reorganizing and saw my old scanner gathering dust on one side of our storeroom. I rarely get to use my scanner nowadays since my prime use of the thing was mostly for scanning line art to be digitally colored during my digital artist wannabe days. Anyway, seeing it made me write this guide to scanning.

One important rule about scanning documents and images is garbage in, garbage out. Don’t expect your computer to turn a blurry and very hazy photo into a crisp high-resolution image. (Unless, of course, you have some really fancy imaging software to do it for you.)

Use that pre-scan feature of your scanner interface. This would give you a preview of the scanned image or at least you can set the portion that you need. Some would swear that all editing should be done with a photo manipulation software (like Photoshop) but I guess for simple and quick-and-dirty scanning, the scanner interface will do.

Select the scanning mode that fits the thing that you’re scanning. Select text for text documents, line art for, uhm, line art and color or grayscale for images.

As far as resolutions go, avoid going beyond 300 dpi since that’s all you need for print. For simple web use, 72 dpi works well. This would make your scanning quite quick too. However, if you’re going for real pro stuff, 600 dpi works prior to photo manipulation.

Be sure to enable the descreen option if you find the images overly crosshatched. Printed material often produce this effect.