Scanning for the web is a specialty medium. Scanning requires advanced skills and training to make your original photo or graphic image recognizable on a wide range of viewing environments on the web, with the added challenge of shrinking your photo or graphic image to the smallest file size possible for quick downloading and viewing.
For a commerce site, scans are a crucial part of the selling process. A well-scanned picture allows for your audience to perceive an added value in your product or service. A poorly scanned picture will hurt your sales and reputation.
Professional designers will first scan a photo or graphic image at a much higher resolution before shrinking it down for the web. This is done to preserve the image quality while making any necessary graphic adjustments. It may include cropping the image to get rid of unwanted areas, rotating the image to keep it straight, retouching the image (often with the aid of image-editing hardware or software), compressing the image, and saving the image to an appropriate file format - all of these things are essential for the your scanned image to show up clearly on the web.
Professional designers often must scan and correct pictures that are either under-exposed or over-exposed, have glares of light or shadows that hide parts of the image, are blurry or dull, or have speckles and creases in the photo.
A designer may not even receive the original images to work with; they might be given a cut-out from a magazine or newsprint, which will create an unattractive dot (moiré) pattern from scanning, and requires serious graphic adjustments.
When scanning graphic images, you almost never use the scanner just as it was when purchased from the store. Left to only its default settings, a scanner will have difficulty picking up detail in the darkest and lightest areas of many pictures, produce colours that don't match, or leave the image looking flat and blurry. That makes it the designer's job to make the necessary corrections without harming the other parts of the photo, so it will all look sharp and crisp.
Go to an electronics store and look at all of the TV screens. Notice how the picture quality varies between the models? That's what you need to consider when scanning for the web, because what you may see scanned on your own computer will not be what will be shown on other people's computers.
There are many variables that determine how your scanned image will look: computer monitors, Windows or Mac computer systems, web browsers (Netscape, Explorer, etc.). A professional designer will test your photo or graphic image to make sure that it will show up properly under all of these circumstances.
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