Totally off topic and a bit cheeky really

[tonyjer]

Hi Everyone

Anyone here scanned a document and then tried to reduce it for e-mail purposes?

Reason I ask is that we all know that shots from a digital camera can easily be converted to a dozen different formats and JPEG fits the bill for e-mail (in my case reducing photographs from about 300kb to about 30ish kb)

However, seems to be much more problematic with scanned stuff. I am only talking about a single A4 size sheet with some faces cut from local newspapers and pasted on (literally!). It is easy to san and you can send to word/adobe etc etc but when you try and reduce the enormous file size to e-mail nothing seems to reduce it to a manageble size (zip included)

Any help would be much appreciated.

Antonio, Anna y Eduardo Felipe

[Ken Berry]

I suppose it depends on how you are scanning and in what format. Using Microsoft Tools Document or Image Scanning will produce large TIF files which are (relatively) difficulty to then manipulate. However, I tend to use any of a number of photographic programs, including Photoshop CS 2, Photoshop Elements 4, Corel PhotoPaint 12, or even my photo archiving program Firehand Ember Max, to scan (usually called 'Acquire' or 'Import' in those programs) and do so in JPEG format. If you set a low scan quality e.g. 75 dpi which is suitable for transmission over the web, you will get a smaller size file. I usually, on the other hand, do a higher quality scan (150 dpi will give A4 sizes of 150 kb and over) and then make a copy of that file and set a much lower quality rate for the copy, which reduces a 150 kb file to around 40 kb. (Most programs of which I am aware, when you save to jpeg, come up with a page asking what quality you want to set it for). This is still perfectly legible but going much below this quality will probably start to affect a printed document's legibility.

BTW, the figures cited above are from an experiment I just did using an A4 sheet of paper covered with type and scanned on a Canon 5200 F scanner using Adobe Photoshop in the first instance set at 150 dpi grayscale in the Twain screen. That produced a file of 149,709 bytes. I then used Ember Max to make a copy of it and set to the lower end of the scale, and it produced a perfectly legible copy of 41,451 bytes.

[DiscCoasterPro]

Hi guys ... while we are off topic is anyone familiar with this site

http://www.faststone.org/

dcp