Image Scanning: The Best Way to Store Data

Oct 3
07:16

2007

Kip Goldhammer

Kip Goldhammer

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Image scanning allows you to digitize and store your photos. However, the quality of the scans depends upon the features of the scanner and the resolution selected by the user.

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For computer users image scanning is the only way to look at electronic files. By this process the scanner converts text and graphic paper documents and films to digital images and the conversion process can be analog or digital.

Image scanning is a simple and easy process and the more one works with the scanner,Image Scanning: The Best Way to Store Data Articles the more efficiently and variably one can use it. It is widely used for commercial purposes, but home and hobby users also enjoy image scanning, especially if they are hobby photographers. A lot of artistic creativity also goes into it and it can be fun as well as useful.

Scanning tutorials are available online for both image and document scanning. Whether it is graphics or text that you want to transfer into a computer, you must know how scanners work. The software generally explains all the steps in detail and for image scanning you can effectively use it for color scanning or for black and white.

For scanning an image some basic steps have to be followed, and for any type of scanner or software the method of scanning a photo on a flatbed scanner is the same. When the light shines on the photo, the photo-electric cells of the scanner capture the colors reflected from the points of the image. These colors are red, green and blue (RGB).

The pixel or the picture element is referred to each point, and the measurement is in pixels per inch, which is the resolution of the image. Three numbers represent every pixel in an image, and these numbers indicate the brightness of the red, green and blue components of the color. So there are different image formats, and each format stores information about pixels and colors in various ways.

Just to give you a general idea about the GIF image and the JPG image. A maximum of 256 different colors is used in a GIF image, and these colors are stored in an indexed color table. A JPG image is much more diverse, and for each color element (RGB) it has 256 different possible values, which makes it three times more variable than the GIF image.

The GIF image has an advantage that it can compress images without causing loss of image quality. Whereas JPG gives more freedom to the user to compress the image as much as he wants, but often the quality of the image is lost, the more you compress it.

Image Scanning is all about quality. And this quality is dependent on various factors like the number of pixels used or the number of possible color values for each pixel. Besides the depth of the color it is more important to see how effective the colors are and how they have been used to show the range of brightness and contrast in the image. The compression of the image could also endanger a loss of quality.

All companies convert their paper documents into digital images through Image Scanning. It relieves the people of work through cumbersome paper data. Scanned images can be stored and converted into any file format. You can suit it to your needs and for any method of document management systems.