Best file format for scanned pictures?

[Triumph]

I'm just getting into scanning, and I'm doing a variety of types, from old black and whites to 70's yellow and red, to new pictures. What's the best format to use, jpg? bmp? adobe format thingy? I don't know where to start, i'm just saving stuff as bitmaps right now. i don't know the difference between formats.

 

[BoberFett]

If you don't mind some image quality loss, jpeg will give you the the smallest file size. Jpeg is a lossy format, while bitmap and tiff are lossless. So those two will give you perfect image quality (it will retain the picture exactly as you scanned it) but they will be quite a bit larger. Those are the three most common formats for images, don't use GIF, it's limited to 256 colors. You could also try PNG, which is lossless and uses compression. It's not as universal as the other formats, but is gaining acceptance. If you're putting photos on the web, use jpeg as it's still really the only option for high color images that anyone can view.

 

[Huma]

to fit the most and keep the file size down, high quality jpg works out well. Like bober said, don't use gifs for photos.

It's generally very hard to see degradation in high quality jpgs.
If you're using adobe products (photoshop) jpg at 60+ tend to be quite good, but I've had to use 70-80 for some pics to keep the quality up.

 

[Triumph]

some guy at work who is pretty experienced at scanning said that while a high quality jpg looks good on the screen, it won't look as good as a bmp when you print it out. any truth to this?

 

[Modus]

Print quality usually looks worse than screen quality, since your monitor only has about 1000 dots horizontally, whereas a page will have 600dpi x 8.5" = 5100 dotos across. So the image will be stretched to fit on the high resolution of the printer.

But for good quality prints, just make sure your images stay around 5000x5000 pixels. Of course, for web graphics, much smaller sizes will do.

Modus

 

[AndyHui]

If space is not a consideration, then I would prefer tiff (.TIF Tagged Image Format) as these retain the original quality of the scan, without loss of detail or colour. Only problem is that these files can get quite large, as they are not usually compressed.

 

[Huma]

Depending on what print quality you'll need, you might need to save at a higher res.

For newspapers, 72dpi should still work ok, but for any decent quality level of printing (magazine) 300dpi should be better. You can still save as a jpg, but it'll be much larger.

Tiffs are good, but pretty can be huge. My preferred format when size isn't a concern? PSD.

 

[dcdomain]

Here's the rules I follow:

GIF: Web graphics: black and white, animation
JPEG: Web graphics: photos, color
PNG: Same as JPEG, support is in place, but not as many people use it yet.

TIFF: If I will be printing the scanned images I'll use the TIFF format.

I usually scan at 300dpi and from there I'll edit and print at 300dpi, or I'll scale the image down for the web. The web can only support 72dpi, so anything above that would be a waste.

 

[Noriaki]

If I want to retain quality I use 24bit Bitmaps.
You can't beat 'em for quality, but they are megs and megs for each image...

jpegs are what I use for most of my pictures, they are a few kB.

But printing I keep them .bmp

TIFFs are suppose to be quite good to, though I've personally never used them.