Our printer, as I quickly discovered, is meant for printing- not scanning. It moved at a snail pace and scanned in at a max of 600 dpi, which is fine for most pictures but with certain exceptionally tiny pictures a larger dpi is necessary. It also only scanned pictures in as jpegs. I don't like jpegs at all. They are too unpredictable for scans in my opinion and since so much data is compressed in them and detail lost they reduce the maximum possible quality and detail I can instill in them with photoshop. I much prefer png or tiff. Another problem with my printer scanner was it only scanned in 1 picture at a time and the automatic cropping was poorly done. Sometimes I'd have to put construction paper under my photos so it didn't crop off parts of the picture and crop manually later on.
Luckily for me my dad mentioned an old flatbed scanner we had in our basement. As soon as I started using it I knew I could never go back. Its an Epson Perfection 3490 photo and its perfect. Of course when I first started using it I decided I would scan every photo in at the max dpi. My tip to you is: don't do this. Every photo was half a gb and it was a pain to resize them all. I usually go with 700 for small Polaroids and 400-500 dpi for the more modern and larger Kodak film. But, once I got that figured out it was amazing. I can scan in and label 300 photos in a few hours because it allows you to scan in multiple photos at once. And its speedy. If you don't have a good scanner like this it is well worth the investment.
And now I'll finish with some of my favorite photos I've scanned of the Wesselowski / Byers side of the family. (most of these have been photoshopped for quality)
Helen Byers Basketball Captain 1926 as a senior in high school.
The only vacation my Grandpa went on. He's with his Grandma Myrtle Williams and brother.
Family picture featuring Harold Wesselowski, Helen Byers and their kids.
Another Family picture with Helen Byers and her sons.
Harold Wesselowski
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