Scanning photos - increasing resolution?

GinandTonic

My ILs are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary next month and I had this great idea to collect pictures from friends and family and make them sort of a scrapbook online - through shutterfly or whatever's on sale.

The issue though is that when I scan the pictures, they're grainy and when I upload them to the site, they don't really work. 

Is there anything I can do - maybe on the end of my scanner (I did it at work, so it's this huge printer/copier/scanner thing, but I didn't mess with any settings or anything)?  It emails it to me as a pdf and I have to pull it out of there - maybe that's the problem?

Ideas?

lmdbww

You should be able to increase the resolution that the scanner is scanning at somewhere through the unit's menus.

I believe my old HP scanned at 1200, but my new Canon all in one only goes up to 600 which I think sucks! (Especially since it's supposed to be special for photos).

GinandTonic

Thanks.  Someone has it all tied up for work this morning (how dare they!), but I can go mess around with it this afternoon.

Mrs Manners

Increasing the resolution is going to increase the file size too - so just be aware. On a color copier, I'd try scanning at 400 DPI to start (600 is going to give huge files), also go under the settings and change it to Photo (you should have something that's asking you the type of document you are scanning). Most copiers scan at 200 or 300 DPI by default. Oh...and change your file format to JPEG instead of PDF.