By: John F. Williams

Your image should now be visible in the PhotoShop window.

Part Two:

Step One: Before going any further you should immediately save your image. Click File-->Save As... When the Save As window appears navigate to find you Zip disk. From the drop down menu select .TIFF. Now name your image making sure to add the .tif extension. (ex. myimage.tif) Click Save and the dialogue box (fig. 1b) below will appear.

fig. 1b. Select Macintosh and confirm that LZW compression is not selected.

Step two: If you have to rotate your image, do so by selecting Image-->Rotate Canvas and then choose whichever rotation is appropriate.

Step three: Crop the image using the crop tool. After selecting the crop tool (fig. 2b) place cursor on image and drag to select an appropriate crop. You can fine tune by dragging the small boxes located on the corners or sides. After you have made your selection double click within the crop box and PhotoShop will resize the image.

fig. 2b. To find the crop tool you click and hold in the upper box on the tool palette and the crop box will be to the right.

Step four: Apply some color correction to your image. I suggest you use Curves (fig. 3b) for this, but you may use Levels. Click images-->Adjust and select Curves. The first step should be to click Auto. In most cases this will do the job.

fig. 3b. Click on the center of the bar and drag down to darken image (increase contrast) or up to lighten.

Step five: Now is the time to resize you image in preparation for saving. Click images-->Image Size... (fig. 4b) First set your resolution to 200 pixel/inch. Second, under Print Size set 10 inches for height or width depending on whether the image is a horizontal or a vertical.

fig. 4b. Resolution 200, Height or Width set to 10 inches.

Step six: When you scanned the image and resized it you might have noticed that it is not quite as sharp as the original. This can be fixed by using the Unsharp Mask (fig. 5b) feature of PhotoShop. This is not a mandatory step. Click Filter-->Sharpen and select Unsharp Mask... As a guideline I use an Amount of 100%, Radius of .05 and a Threshold of 1. You can experiment with the slider bars and see the results in the preview window.

fig. 5b. Unsharp Mask window.

Step Seven: Now is the time to save your final image. Click File-->Save As... Just like when you saved the image as a .tif, locate you Zip disk. Use the drop down menu and select .jpeg. Add the .jpg extension and click Save. I recommend you save at a quality of 10 in PhotoShop 5.5 (fig.6b) and high in PhotoShop 4.0. A .jpeg image is a compressed image. PhotoShop is a smart program and compresses your .tiff image to less than half the file size without affecting how it looks. However, if you open that .jpeg again and do more work then save as a .jpeg again you will begin to loss quality. A compression of a compression and so on. If you anticipate doing more work to an image, don't remove the original .tif from you Zip disk.

fig. 6b. PhotoShop 5.5 save window.