LaserSoft Imaging

Hello,

I have an Epson 1660 Photo scanner which has a negative insert. I scaned a negative into Photoshop did some touchup, saved it to a high quality JPEG and took it to Costco to make Christmas cards. When I received the cards back they seemed rather blurry and slightly pixellated. I've never used Costco to process digital images so I don't have anything to compare the results to.

After thinking about it I came to the conclusion that my scan settings were incorrect. I knew I was going to print so I set the output resolution to 300dpi.

Thinking back I suspect this is wrong and what I ended up with is a negative scanned at 300dpi, which when enlarged to 4x6 gave me a resolution of 75dpi. Should I of scanned at 1200dpi so that when the negative was enlarged to 4x6 I got 300dpi resolution?

Dear Mr. Cotellese.

If you are scanning negatives, you have to be aware that the images are normally enlarged for printing. My proposal is:

1. Drag the scan frame over the negative image on the preview. The original size of this frame will be around 1*1.4 inches.
2. Set the output size to your desired printing size, e.g. 4*6 inches. You will see, that the scale values will change.
3. Set the output resolution to your desired output resolution. 300 dpi sounds fine.

In this case, SilverFast will scan with a higher resolution to produce an image with 4*6 inches at 300 dpi.

Eric.

Well now I'm really confused. I did follow the steps you described this is what gave me the results described above, I made the supposition that increasing my output dpi to 1200 would give me better results. The problem must be somewhere else in my work flow. I'll probably experiment with this after the holiday.

Joe C.