Visualizing Microbial Seascapes - Scanning (Mac)

Scanning

Scanning is accomplished with the use of a scanner and scanning software. An image editing program like Photoshop or Preview is useful afterward to crop, resize and adjust your image.

How to Scan on Macintosh OS X:

1. Align the object in the scanner bed face down in the scanner.
2. Launch Image Capture from the Applications folder.
3. Drag the boundary box around the portion of the image you want to capture
4. Set resolution (see below).
5. Set the Format to TIFF (this is an uncompressed image file format)
6. Note the Scan to location. This is where your file will be saved. You can change this.
7. Click the Scan button.

Note: you may need to save your scanned file to the network space on Orca then move to another computer to continue editing in Photoshop or Preview.

Please ask the students at the front desk of the Computer Center for assistance if you have any questions.

At what resolution should I scan?

A good rule of thumb is to set the scan resolution at double what your final image’s resolution will be.

Image type	final resolution	scan resolution
web image	72	150
image for print	300	600

Small images: If you are going to be enlarging a small image the higher your resolution the better the enlarged image will look. Experiment to get the best results!