Scanning Those Images

If you are going to post a relic, if you can not clean it good enough, try adding another piece of glass between it and the scanner glass.
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To post a ring, one way is to take a piece of foam and cut a slit in it.. place the ring in the slit and lay it ring first down on the glass.

To minimize the shadow affect, lay a thick wood picture frame on the glass and place your coin inside it. This will keep the cover up off the coin and disperse the shadow. In place of the wooden picture frame, you can try household things like plastic or glass bowls etc. You get the idea.
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To scan those darker coins like Indian head pennies and large cents: after you have scanned the coin, use your image program to experiment by adding red color to the pic and then half as much green color until you get a beautiful copper/tan color. With nickels play with the brightness and contrast to improve the 'V' nickels and Buffalo's. Remember many coins don't scan into sharp focus so you must improve the focus with your image program.

Most of you are probably familiar with scanning techniques but every now and then comments are posted and I thought it might be helpful is there was a basic guide for reference. There are many other ways to save and post images but this is intended for those who maybe have just bought a scanner and would like to show off some of their finds. This is a simple and effective way and can save space on your hard drive.

When scanning any image there are a number of points to take into consideration. Firstly what is the scanned image going to be used for? Is it purely for the sake of posting in the gallery, for your own records or perhaps for ease of identification or perhaps all three. If you want am image that will enable you to zoom in close enabling you to identify things such as mint marks on a coin etc, then high resolution, 600dpi or greater can be used and saved in various formats such as tiff, jpg or the hosting software programmes own file extension (recommended). If the image is for your own records or just for the gallery then 300dpi might be a better option. The preferred format for images to be shown in the gallery would be jpg, this allows excellent compression with little loss to overall quality. Most software programs will offer you a choice of formats to save as, and this is where choosing the image's purpose becomes paramount. Most scanners will supply their own software for scanning, and this can be used as a way of scanning and saving files, however if you have other software programmes on your pc such as Corel Draw, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, Livepix etc, it may be preferable for you to scan from within these packages. This will allow you more manipulation of your image, cropping, skewing etc before you finally save the finished scan as a file. It is a good idea to, when you first scan and save the image, to save it with no compression in the file format of the software package you are using. When this has been done you can open the file once again, manipulate it, edit it, in fact do what you like to it before saving it as a jpg file ready for posting in the gallery. Doing this will enable you to scrap any alterations you have made knowing the original file is always there to be opened once again and at its highest quality. Once you are reasonably happy with the image you want to post, save the file as a jpg, this should be available on the drop down menu within the programme you are using. Usually you are then asked for the amount of compression you require, on more basic packages this will be low, medium or high, but on the more advanced it will be shown as a percentage. Choosing the level of compression is really dictated by the final size of the file needed. For the gallery, file sizes of approximately 50k are ideal and provided you have not scanned the image at too high a resolution in the first place saving the file at one of these levels then checking to see its size should be straightforward. I've found that compressing a file to approximately 50k is more than enough, little quality is lost and storage space is minimal (we only have so much space on the gallery for images). When posting into the gallery another option is offered and this is the resize option. Most pc screens will be running at 800 x 600 so this is a good size to pick. Even if your screen is optimised to show more colours and a greater number of pixels, the image will still look excellent, will download faster and will enable other users to view it at their optimum resolution.

An excellent software package called Livepix is available for downloading free at http://pcbuyersguide.com/software/free-software.html