I recently have purchased an HP S20 Photo scanner, Photoshop, and a CD-rewriter. I have many negatives I would like to scan and archive on CD-ROMs for possible future printing. I would like a high quality print (i.e., 300 DPI). What format should I use to archive? I know TIFF retains the most information, without loss of data, but it is a large file size. Is there a compression techinique available which would allow for smaller file sizes, yet restore the all information?

-- Clint Cowan (ccowan@norcross.rms.slb.com), May 26, 1999

Answers

Use LZW compressed tiff format. Scan directly into Photoshop. Go to the "File" menu, scroll down to "Import" then choose "Select TWAIN_32 sorce". Here you should see you Twain driver. This might bypass any auto functions of a cheaper image editing program. The amount of compression you achive depends alot on the content of the image. If you are scaling up the images do it while scanning. For instance scan the neg at 200% and 300dpi.

-- Don Edgar (deldon@teleport.com), May 26, 1999.

YOu can also save it in a high quality jpeg file. This will give you somewhere between an 8 and 10Mb file that will be adequate for storage. The problem with loss in jpeg files occurs when you are working in a file and repeatedly save it in the jpeg format. For storage however, you should be OK

-- Jonathan Ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.bc.ca), May 27, 1999.

Heck, with the cost of CDs so cheap, why worry about file size?! I save in PSD format and NEVER compress when archiving. TIFF will do just as well except it can't preserve certain neat functions of Photoshop such as layers. Howard

-- Howard (hposner1@swarthmore.edu), June 08, 1999.