Baffled why scanned documents print faded?
- Thread starter Twister
- Start date
When you scan a document you are taking a picture of it, which is why you need an extra Optical Character Reader step if you want to edit it. Your scanner has no idea that all you care about is the black type on the white background and it tries to acquire as much info as if you'd put the original of the Mona Lisa on the glass. You may have noticed if the document had a fold or wrinkle that you got a decent pic of all the shadows which it'll print in the most delicate greys. When it prints, the closest it'll go all on its own to your black and white original is grey-scale, and it'll put all the info from a few dozen (or more) shades of grey into your printer.
So do the poor machine a favour and tell it to ignore all but the black and white info as part of your scanning settings. OR, let it scan away as if it was full colour, but then don't print until you've used an image editor (GraphicConverter on the Mac is an old stand-by) to convert the scan to BW.
Resolution (that 330dpi) is just pixels per inch, and the higher the number the smoother and less jaggy the lines will be, but it won't make them any darker.
When you create a text document in Word™ or any other software, the only colour there is—unless you picked something else—is the default 100% black, so that's all the printer uses.
So do the poor machine a favour and tell it to ignore all but the black and white info as part of your scanning settings. OR, let it scan away as if it was full colour, but then don't print until you've used an image editor (GraphicConverter on the Mac is an old stand-by) to convert the scan to BW.
Resolution (that 330dpi) is just pixels per inch, and the higher the number the smoother and less jaggy the lines will be, but it won't make them any darker.
When you create a text document in Word™ or any other software, the only colour there is—unless you picked something else—is the default 100% black, so that's all the printer uses.
I'm thinking of scanning some old print photos to my computer. Anybody tried this? Good idea? Bad idea?
Try it and see what happens. A friend tried scanning some 50 yr old photos on one of them 'new' 3 in 1 scanners that do it all. The old photos wouldn't scan! Put those pix in my 13 yr old UMax scanner and it scanned them just fine. Have no idea why it didn't scan on the new machine.
OJ already beat me to the punch on this one. I'm using some kind of cheap freeware to drive my scanner, and I usually need to select "document mode" or some such thing to get the results I want. You might still be able to use photoshop or gimp to sharpen them up for you.
Up to now, I have been using the scanners at those kiosks in places like Wal-Mart but it is hassle to bring the pics there. Much more comfortable doing it at home.
So, did you scan the photos to your computer? Were they colour pics? How is the image quality?
They were old black and white home photos on the dark side with poor lighting of average quality.
Saved them to my PC then used a linux photo app to brighten them up a bit which made them look a bit better.
