If you have existing photos, you don't have the option above, but you can still get very good results.

Scan your photos at the highest true resolution of your scanner. This will probably be about 600 dpi (dots per inch) or possibly 300 dpi. You can try turning on sharpening if your scanning software has this but don't do too much adjustment at this stage unless the scan looks really murky. I find the auto-adjust setting often works fine, although you may sometimes need manual adjustment of contrast and brightness etc.

Once scanned in, save a copy at this high resolution, in case you might need one. You can get the scanning program to produce a JPG output or use TIFF output if you want to be really professional, however this will produce very large files to store.

I find .JPG at high or medium quality to be adequate, and reduces the file size to something reasonable, perhaps 500K to 2MB per scanned image - this is a good file size to keep a copy of your large image before you resize down to display on the web.

Once you have your large size scanned image, open it in any photo editing package to resample the image down to about 750x500 pixels. (see our help page here for more on this) Don't forget to tick the box keep the aspect ratio the same when you resize down.

At this stage you can try sharpening the image or making other image adjustments if it still looks a bit murky. Don't do overboard though, back off the sharpness if the image starts to look too grainy.

Did you know that many digital cameras sharpen their images as part of the picture taking process, so don't feel guilty about doing this.

Other things to try are to increase the colour saturation a small amount (don't go mad!), adjust gamma correction, or perhaps the contrast. Don't be tempted to fiddle too much though.

If you follow these tips, you should amaze yourself with the improvement you get and you are ready to share your photo scan with the world.