Tips for Scanning Photos from Catalogs

Scan catalog photos at 300 dpi (much larger than you need them), and bring them into your graphics program for improvement. Here's a trick that sometimes works to get rid of the cross-hatch moiré pattern produced by overlapping color half-tone screens in the catalog photo. This works best if you've scanned in an image at least 4 times as large as you need in your final online photo. I am giving directions for Adobe Photoshop 5.0, though you may need to translate a bit to do this your own graphics program:

1. Filter | Blur | Blur. This tends to soften the moiré pattern some.
2. Image | Image Size. Now reduce the image to the final size. I've found that having the largest dimension about 200 to 225 pixels works well for rectangular pictures (somewhat less for square pictures). If you have several photos on a page, you'll want to reduce the size even farther. The process of reducing the size causes the program to rearrange the pixels, and soften the moiré pattern even more.
   
   Tip: NEVER reduce a GIF image without changing to RGB mode first. After you're finished with the reduction, you can change back to Indexed Color mode. If you reduce a GIF image without doing this, you get a lot of "jaggies" on the edges, and the overall quality looks pretty poor.
3. Filter | Sharpen | Sharpen to see if you can get rid of some of the fuzziness. If you're lucky, when you do this, the moiré pattern will be gone, and the final image will look pretty good.

I've also found I can often improve marginal photos or catalog scans by Image | Adjust | Brightness/Contrast. Increasing the contrast will often make the colors and the image much more vivid than before. Be careful, though. A little does a lot. Too much contrast and the photo begins to look harsh.