Showing posts with label organize. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organize. Show all posts

How To Scan Your Pictures And Get The Best Photo Quality For Your Slideshow

A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s a total cliché but what it means is this: A picture tells a story. One photo can convey expression, emotion, character. It can bring a flood of memories and affect other sensors such as smell and taste. A picture is powerful.

When photos are combined with music and movement, the emotional impact becomes even more powerful than the music or the image alone. That’s what a slideshow does.


If you are in the beginning stages of gathering your photos, this is the time to be thinking about the quality of your pictures. I’m not talking about if the photo is a little blurry or the subject is out of focus. I’m not even referring to red-eye or uneven framing. I am talking about pixels.


If your photos are already in a digital format (preferably jpg or png), you probably don’t need to worry about pixelation problems. Unless of course you took a screenshot of a thumbnail on Facebook. Then we might have some clarity issues. That’s a biggie. We’ll go over that in a new post.


PURCHASING A SCANNER


Scanning your photos can easily be done at home and there is no reason to go and buy an expensive scanner for your slideshow. You can get a quality scanner from Amazon for around $70 such as the Epson Perfection V19 Color Photo & Document Scanner or the Canon CanoScan Lide 300 Scanner. Both are inexpensive good quality flatbed scanners.




Epson Perfection V19 Color Photo & Document Scanner

4800 dpi optical resolution

Scan and share on cloud services

Epson Easy Photo Scan software

Fast speeds

Easy-to-use buttons

USB powered



Canon CanoScan Lide 300 Scanner

Fast scanning up to 10 seconds

2400 x 2400 dpi resolution

Fade correction and dust reduction

Auto scan mode

Built in PDF button




Here at Milestone Slideshows, we prefer the All-In-One printer/scanners because they take up less space and photos can be fed or placed scanned on the glass. Our current model is the Canon MX922. It’s more expensive at $399, but it has a lot of features such as Cloud and Mobile printing. You can even print your own DVDs if you’re still into that.




Canon MX922 All-In-One Printer/Scanner

Wireless LAN

AirPrint

Google Cloud Print

Wireless Printing

Mobile Device Printing

CD/DVD Direct Printing

USB 2.0 Hi Speed


You don't have to buy a scanner, but they do come in handy. And if your family is like mine, there is a cardboard box in the attic that is dying to be sorted and scanned.

If you don't want the added expense of purchasing a scanner, you can take your photos to a nearby Walgreens, Walmart, Sam's Club, or Costco. Many of these places have photo kiosks where you can scan your photos and save them on a flash drive or DVD. Some kiosks even offer uploading them to your Dropbox, Google Drive, or iCloud.

SCANNER SETTINGS

Now that you have your scanner, let’s talk about your settings. 


RESOLUTION

When scanning your photos, size and quality of the photo go hand in hand. It’s mostly about the dpi or “dots per inch.” The “dots” are the pixels and the higher the number, the more information. The more information, the better the image quality.


DPI can range from 75dpi into the thousands. Now, you could scan your photos at 4800dpi and that would be a high quality photo. But for your slideshow, it is not necessary. We have done a lot of experimenting and we have found that the perfect dpi for images for our slideshows is 300dpi. Because of the motion of the effects and transitions and that most displays are 4K or less, we simply do not need all that information.


Clear images are best. Again, I’m not talking about blurry photos. Pixelation is the issue. Take a look at these 2 images.


Photo scanned at 75dpi

Resolution 65x37

Photos scanned at 300dpi

Resolution 1920x1080


The image on the right is obviously far superior to the pixelated photo on the left. The picture on the right was scanned at 300 dpi and is large enough for us to apply zooming and panning effects without the image becoming pixelated. And the crowd goes wild!


CROPPING YOUR PHOTOS


When scanning your pictures, make sure your edges are straight and they are cropped correctly. We can make some corrections if there is a small rim of white around part of an image but if the photo is scanned with a rotation, some of that photo may not appear in your slideshow. 


Take a look at these 2 images. The 1st photo was placed crooked on the scanner. The 2nd picture represents the crooked photo after it was cropped.


Rotated

Rotated and Cropped


Now, let’s see the original, perfectly cropped and scanned photo compared to the picture that was scanned with a rotation and cropped.


Original Photo

Crooked and Cropped


You can see that some of the photo is missing and it is slightly turned. Thus, it is important to make sure your photos are placed neatly on your scanner so your entire photo is in your video.


CLEAN YOUR GLASS

Your settings are set. Your photos are great quality and they are ready to tell their story. Make sure your pictures stay looking great by cleaning your scanner. Smudges and dust particles can build in minutes. Make sure you clean your flatbed scanner’s glass before beginning your project.


START SCANNING

Now you are all set to begin scanning your images. If working on a large project, I recommend you set your scanner to place your saved digital photos in their own folder. You can set your scanner up to name your scans with a prefix that your scanner automatically labels each photo. Your pictures can be auto saved in a specific folder and labelled “My-project-scans-001.jpg,” “My-project-scans-002.jpg,” “My-project-scans-003.jpg,” etc. It’s a great way to keep organized.


Once you have all of your photos on your computer, it’s as easy as dragging and dropping them into your slideshow project on our website. From your dashboard, you can arrange your photos and video clips in order and we’ll take it from there!


Getting Organized Ain't Easy - How to set your slideshow up for success in 5 easy steps

It should be easy.

After all, it’s just a few pictures of her. And a few pictures of him. And some of the two of them together.




It SHOULD be easy. But it’s not. The struggle of making a slideshow is REAL. Just getting pictures from other contributors can be a struggle.


We live in a weird time. For many of us, a large portion of our lives took place in the pre-digital world. A time when we took pictures and waited days to see our image - an image that was usually blurry, discolored, and everyone had the dreaded red eye. Paper photos in most American households can be found in yellowed photo albums in hallway closets, in boxes of knick knacks hidden away in the attic, or lining the seldom opened drawer in the downstairs bathroom.


But it’s not just paper photos. It’s portraits. Portraits that used to line the walls are now tucked under guest room beds and old chests.


The last 20+ years however have presented their own problem and it’s in the numbers. The magnitude of photos people take is astounding since literally everyone with a phone is a photographer. According to InfoTrends, 1.2 trillion digital photos will be taken this year or 160 photos for each of the 7.5 billion people that live here. That's a lot of pictures. And most of them are totally unworthy of being in a slideshow. Getting rid of the photo clutter can seem like a nightmare.





So how do we put it all together? Making a system and sticking with it makes it easier. Here are the step by steps of how to organize your photos and videos.


Step 1 - Rome wasn’t built in a day

It’s a cliche but it’s true. Doing it all in one sitting will lead to frustration. If you have to get it done quickly, you may have to give up some of the options such as having them in perfect chronological order. You might want to consider a randomized order of photos in your slideshow to speed up the process.


Step 2 - Make broad categories

Think of each song as a chapter in a book. If your slideshow will have 3 songs, then you have 3 categories to place your photos in. For example, a typical wedding slideshow has 3 chapters - the bride growing up, the groom growing up, and the last is photos of the bride and groom together. Those are 3 broad categories that can be divided into smaller groupings for fine tuning.


Step 3 - Dividing your categories

The larger categories created in step 2 can be subdivided into smaller sections for more accurate arranging. The bride’s chapter for example can be divided into baby and toddler, elementary school age, and highschool and college. First you can use pictures of big moments or milestones such as your baby’s first walk, first date, prom, graduation, birthdays, etc. then you can fill in the gaps with other photos you like. If using our app, you can arrange your photos online quickly and precisely using our drag and drop interface.


Step 4 - Ready to scan

If you have paper photos and they are generally in the right order, you are ready for scanning. Scanning your pictures in the right sequence is very helpful when arranging your files in order for your slideshow. Be sure to place your scanned photo files in the same folders you created in step 2. You can fine tune your arrangement once your files are in your project.




Step 5 - Ready, set, upload!

Now that your pictures are in the right folder, you are ready to put them in your project using the app’s drag and drop interface on our website. Go to milestoneslideshows.com and create!