Scanning problems

September 7, 2010

Well, it turns out that all the scans I’ve been doing over the past ten years (almost 900 of them) are all at a dpi (dots per inch, i.e. resolution) that’s too low for printing them in a book these days. So, at some point I’ll need to rescan everything at 300+ dpi. I’m thinking I might need to take a full week’s vacation from my day job just to focus on that.
In the mean time I created some new sample scans to send to CD just to make sure everything was ok. Well, yes and no. It seems that the 320dpi TIFF files I’m creating look just fine on both my Linux boxes (on which I’m doing the scanning) and several Windows Vista and 7 boxes. Once CD gets them however and opens them up on their Mac, they get a crappy image.
Here’s the original TIFF. The first screenshot below is what I see when I open it windows, the second is what CD’s seeing on a Mac. If I convert the TIFF to a JPG CD’s got no problem with it. However, I’d rather we all used the better TIFF image rather than downgrade them all to JPGs. If you’ve got any suggestions or tests we could run, please leave a comment.