Finding Low Cost Scanning For Digital Scrapbooking

by Pete Fontaine

Digital Scrapbooking is the hugely popular art of turning your precious photographic memories into beautiful personalized creations. And the good news is that the net is loaded with free and inexpensive tutorials, creation software, and community. You will never be at a loss for creative ideas, new and innovative tools, layouts, and templates.

Don’t limit yourself to just using just your digital photos. All of your old photos can be sent to a low cost scanning service to be digitized. For as little as a nickel apiece you can add hundreds of your favorite memories to your scrapbook.

Scanning photos for your scrapping hobby has the added advantage of preserving them from deterioration due to moisture, mold, or age. Saving your photos to a DVD also allows you to store a copy in two or more places permanently shielding them from loss or damage. Scanning services make it possible to give a complete set of all your pictures to family members.

If you’ve ever wanted to build a photobook or upload your photos to a photo sharing site then you’ll have an additional benefit to scanning photos for your scrapbook. Want to build a slideshow to view on TV? You can do it online or buy inexpensive software. You can even add your own music. Want to create a T-shirt with a crazy photo on it? Just search “photo t-shirt”. It’s that easy!

The optimum resolution for scanning your photo prints is 300 dpi. Don’t accept lower and don’t pay for higher. Nothing is gained by scanning at a higher resolution than 300 dpi, and you’ll be handling much larger files. That means any use of the scans will be slower. Do make sure your scans are saved as high quality jpeg files. This means that the scans are saved with very low compression and thus higher quality. You will be able to use free photo editing software to reduce the file size for copy to use on the web, if needed.

Find a photo scanner who offers an inexpensive photo enhancement service. These services can make descent improvements to most of your photos. Don’t pay a lot for this because it won’t perform miracles, and it won’t fix all of the problems. But beware; always enhance a copy of your original scans. Don’t let a photo scanner send just the enhanced scans. Photo enhancement as well as any manipulation or rotation of your scans means they will be recompressed. Repeated recompression means loss of image quality.

Spend a few minutes searching the web and you’ll find educational E-books, classes, organizational software, layout ideas, and scrapbook embellishment of every kind. Then find an inexpensive photo scanning service and make your precious memories come alive.

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