Best Digital Scanning techniques - help

Question

I want to scan a paper shown below. Actually I need the photo of the jets taking off, I dont need the entire newspaper.

This is what I have - I have to do color scanning, I have a HP scanner which does color scanning at 1200dpi.

My requirements are to just get the jets take-off in digital format. In order to get the best pixel capture -

1. Is it best to get the entire newspaper scanned & using photoshop to cut out just the jets takeoff image section? OR
2. Using a scissors cut out the jets image & only scan that? i.e. just scan below image.

Later on I might want to take printouts of these scanned images, so I need to scan at the highest possible resolution (in pixels) so that I can take a big printout A2 or above.

Please help.

Answer 1

Scanning at max resolutions is always the best bet for quality but worst for speed and file size. Try to preview the image, crop and the scan with de-smear or anti-alias option if avail.

If image is magazine quality, chances are it was printed in 1200 to 2400 dpi. WHen scanning any dot pixel image near the same resolution is prone to aliasing artifacts with "herringbone patterns" if this is the case check the options for de-scale at the resolution chosen. THis imparts a filter called a Nyquist Criteria filter to ensure the image being digitized is filtered to eliminate edge noise near the sampling rate and above to prevent aliasing distortion..

A common example if this concept is not understood is the News guy wearing a striped shirt that goes wavy when the camera zooms in or out to the same number of stripes as your TV has lines.

In any event, the best image is one that is cropped then scanned at max resolution on the scanner before transfer. 1200 dpi on an 11" sheet is over 11Kx9K pixels or >100 MPixel or >300MB !! THis takes a long time on USB2 even at max burst speed.

Of course you can reduce resolution , if you have no need. But you cannot undo this by sharpening PS.

For 35mm slides I use 2400 or 4800 dpi if possible to get projector size quality. But these are huge files.