Help With Scanning And Digital Cameras

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Using a scanner / Using a digital camera

Using a scanner

A scanner is like a colour photocopier, but instead of the image coming out on paper, it's stored on your computer's hard drive, from where it can be viewed, printed, emailed, or uploaded to the school's web site.

At school we use 'Corel Paint' for scanning and editing pictures. If you have a scanner at home your software may be different but the process is the same:

1. Place photo/picture onto scanner (same as photocopying)
2. Launch Corel Paint from 'Program Files'
3. File > Acquire Image > Acquire
4. Click 'Preview' - this gives you an overview of the whole scanning area
5. Drag to select the area containing the picture you wish to scan
6. Click 'Scan'

The image will appear in a new window. You may need to use the Rotate & Resample options in the Image menu to get the image just how you want it. 'Resampling' refers to making an image smaller, essential when preparing pictures for the internet. Whilst images scanned for printing should be scanned at 300dpi quality (dpi=dots per inch), images for the internet should be 72dpi (a computer screen requires less than 1/4 of the 'quality' required for printing), and generally around 300-400 pixels wide, which will turn out at about four inches across on most people's screens. The filesize on disk should be around 25k or less.

Resizing an image (this image is 396 pixels wide and just 21k on disk)

Save your image using a linkword style without spaces or punctuation in the filename (eg 'ClassFourLondonTrip2004a', 'ClassFourLondonTrip2004b' etc). to give you

Using a digital camera

Digital cameras have now all but replaced 35mm film cameras. Whereas a 35mm camera can take 24 or 36 shots on a single roll, a digital camera can take hundreds. You can also review your photos on the built-in LCD screen and, if you don't like what you've taken, delete it and take another.

To store pictures, digital cameras either have a fixed, built-in memory, or use small memory chips with various names: CompactFlash, SD cards, MMC cards, etc. These need to be connected to a computer using a card reader for the images to be downloaded onto the computer's hard drive, where they can be viewed, printed, emailed, uploaded to the school web site, etc. Alternatively, there are some printers which can read cards directly and print out photos.

Once the images are on the hard drive you can proceed as for scanned images, eg use a program like Corel Paint to prepare the image.

Related pages: How To Edit Pages

Category: Help Pages

Author: Mr Kershaw