Digitizing Your Photos, Slides, and Negatives - Beginning Photo Retouching and Restoration Using GIMP - page 22

in the first place. It's also a good idea to use a soft bristle brush or bulb brush on the material to be scanned,
to remove any loose dust. This is especially true with transparencies—even the smallest dust particles will
stand out. Use caution when brushing off original materials. If the emulsion is flaking or loose, you could
make the damage even worse.

Figure 2-1. Keeping cleaning articles near your scanner is a good idea

■ When cleaning your scanner, spray the cleaning fluid on the cloth and not on the glass platen. this
will prevent the cleaning fluid from running into the seams of your scanner, which could possibly damage it.

Note

Scanning Photographs
It's important to scan the original image at the correct resolution, to have sufficient data to work with,
especially when the edited image will be printed as an enlargement. If the input data is too low, the result
will be an image with a jagged appearance. The following illustration (Figure 2-2 ) shows two enlarged
sections scanned from a 3" × 5" photograph of the lettering on a boat. The image on the left is a scan at 300
DPI (for print), and that on the right is a scan at 75 DPI (the resolution generally used for viewing images on
the Web). Ninety-six DPI is also used for web-based images.