Posting pictures on the web

Can someone give me a brief primer on how to post photographs on the

internet. I suppose you need something called a scanner, but that is

pretty much all I know. Thanks.

For posting on the web, you don't need anywhere near as much scanner as you would for a full-fledged digital darkroom (where you actually intend to work on your digital files with the intention of printing enlargements on a printer). Just a cheap flatbed can be enough, and it doesn't have to be even one of the 2400 or more dpi scanners (like Canon, Epson, etc.). For posting images on the web, just scanning the print can be enough, but, it's useful to be able to scan negatives too, because the negatives you get from the minilab or wherever are often much better than the little prints made from them. Being able to scan negatives allows you to really see what kind of picture you took, and to adjust it the way you want in Photoshop Elements (or any other photo editing software). Therefore, if you can't get a dedicated film scanner (quite a lot of overkill just for posting on the internet), I would recommend as a minimum that can serve well, a 2400dpi flatbed scanner with built-in negative and slide adapter. If you want to spend a bit more, one of the low-end film scanners, like Minolta. If you intend on doing digital darkroom stuff later on, a more expensive 4000dpi film scanner is what you need.

I only need photos in my computer for the web, since I never print my own work. To that end, I have a flat-bed scanner for my existing prints, but all of my current shooting is scanned during the processing by my lab, and presented as a CD at the time I pick up the photos. These CDs are made from the negatives, and at least for my lab, are presented in 4 resolutions for every shot. I come home, put the CD in the computer and load all 36 pictures to my hard drive in 10 seconds. The quality and ease makes it a bargain at 10 Dollars per roll, especially if I tried sitting for an hour in front of my scanner trying to get the same quality on my own.

 

As an experiment, I have played around with the CD versus the flat-bed for the same image, and it was no contest. The negative scans from the CD are so much more crisp and true as far as colors and sharpness are concerned. See if your lab offers this service.

In the simplest of terms, the steps would be:

 

1. scan (digitize)

 

2. edit (make adjustments, re-size, etc.)

 

3. upload (the image needs to be on a web-accessible server)

 

4. post (specifics depend on the interface provided by the site, some basic HTML knowledge often helps)

 

Obviously, various options exist for each of the steps, and any hardware and software used at each step will have its own learning curve. As others have mentioned, either an inexpensive flatbed scanner, or simply using the scanning service available at most labs is the easy way to go.

 

The big issue you'll face is how accurately the scan represents the actual image, and that, to a large degree will drive how deeply you delve into the various technologies. Some loss of quality is inevetible, but there are techniques to minimize that loss. How far you go with those techniques will be determined by your objectives. At the editing stage, for example, you'll need image editing software, and at a minimum, you'll want to resize the image to dimensions appropriate for Web display (usually something around 500 pixels [a "pixel" is the image element of a digitized image] on the long side).

 

To display the image on the Web, it must be uploaded to a server that can be accessed from other computers connected to the Internet. Photo.net provides a mechanism for uploading image files from your home computer. Other sites often require that you have an image hosting service to which you've uploaded images.

You don't even really need a scanner. When I first started posting images on photo.net, I photographed prints with a digital camera. The bane of copy work used to getting everything evenly lit, accurately colored, and lined up correctly so that the edges are parallell. Now, you can be pretty sloppy and still make it match the original by fixing any problems in Photoshop.

 

For web purposes, if you have a print already, and you have a digital camera and some kind of image editing software, you can skip the scanner. photo.net only permits images up to about a half-megapixel, so any old digital camera will do.

 

There are still a few of the images that I did this way in my photo.net portfolio, in fact.