file format for scans?

Question

Level 1

77 points

file format for scans?

I'm having a terrible battle with extremely large pdfs that are getting produced by Preview when I simply print 10 or 20 scans to pdf. I've always thought that TIFF was a good lossless format for scans and such and that png was a good format for uploading to the web (which is basically how I handle these issues).

Should I change this?

I'm noticing that my 300 dpi TIFF scans are 10 MB in size and that if I save out from preview as jpg or pdf that these are then 2 MB. Is this normal?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15285654/Screen%20shot%202011-11-12%20at%2001.30.43%20PM .png

Does this mean that if I scan the images as pdf or jpg that my pdf prints out of preview will be 1/5 of the size they are now?

Thanks

Posted on Nov 12, 2011 11:36 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Nov 12, 2011 2:22 PM in response to hotwheels22

Suggest you look at these links.

Image File Formats - TIF, JPG, PNG, GIF Which to use?

http://www.scantips.com/basics09.html

Scanning Photos

http://freepages.computers.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~pasher/scanning.htm

Reduce PDF file size

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1292868?tstart=0

 Cheers, Tom 😉

Reply

Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

239,495 points

Nov 12, 2011 3:34 PM in response to Texas Mac Man

Does this mean that if I scan the images as pdf or jpg that my pdf prints out of preview will be 1/5 of the size they are now?

With the reduced size you would have to print them out at 1/5th size to get the exact same quality, but as with that gray tiff in the other thread that was scanned at 300dpi, it was scanned higher than the source dpi, and had no color but was scanned as 24 bit color, grayscale 8 bit or 16 bit & 150-200 dpi scan would've been smaller and likely the same quality.

Reply