Cropped Version

?

Definitely better cropped. What happened to the quality of the image? It's much worse than the original one.

scanned quickly at low res. and i still can't resize my images properly. any hints ?

Sorry James but I'm not an expert in scanning or Photoshop. I just started learning a few months ago and my knowledge is very basic. In any case resizing an image is very simple. In Photoshop (I use Elements but any will do) go to Image>resize>image size and set the measures in pixels. I use around 650 pixels (larger side) for Photonet because I hate not being able to see the whole image on the screen but I guess it's a matter of taste. Good luck.