[seany65]

Alll the scans in this topic are quite good. In fact better than many other scans I've seen on this forum.

I personally don't scan at high dpi (say 1200dpi etc.) as this just means the scan dots are smaller than the colour dots of the picture and so the colour dots are quite big in the result pic.

I use micrografx picture publisher 8 (free with a magazine in about 2000) and a canon Lide 20 or 30 (can't remember which).

I have painted the white backing board thing matt black.

Depending on original image size, I scan at anywhere between 75dpi to 150dpi and have the image made bigger during the scan using the software so a 7x5 pic comes out at say 14x10, with descreen on and save as a bitmap and then when all the scanning batch is finished I process the pic in either ability photopaint (also free) for curves, colour, smart blurring and cropping or pic publisher for cloning, sharpening, defocusing, all the while saving as bitmaps but never saving over the file I've just opened (eg. opening 'Nikki Sanderson 1' by right-clicking and 'opening with' eg. photopaint, leaves the original pic where it was in my photos folder and opens a copy of it in the software, and saving as 'Nikki Sanderson 1B'. I look a the difference between version 1 and 1B by flicking between them in windows 'slideshow'. If I like the changes I then close photopaint and open 1B in Pic publisher, do what I want and save as 1C, and repeat the process of checking but this time between 1B and 1C.

I use the 'stitch' tool in ic pub. 8. I Just open the two pics to be joined in pp8, making sure that the windows they are in are the same size and that the pics are the same size, stitch them and then I use a small cloning tool to make the edge disappear.

and then when all processing is done I shrink the pic down in pic publisher 8 usually to about monitor screen size (as I don't usually print them) and save as a bitmap.