Three Essential Steps
In general, scanning directly from slides gives the best results, although film scanners are expensive. (Well, can you name a photography-related thing that is not expensive?) A capable slide scanner should have a resolution of 1024dpi or higher. Actually 2700dpi resolution is the de facto standard in today's portable film scanner priced in the $1000 to $2000 range.
Scanning from printed photos is a workable alternative, but generally gives poor results, especially poor in shadow areas. (See my explanation in A Tale of Two Films.) If this is the only way, great care must be taken to clean the surface of the photo by using soft tissues. If the scanner is very capable, smudges on the photo surface could be the most prominent feature the shadow area! These smudges, such as greasy fingerprints, are not visible from the print itself, but it affects the reflectance of the print.
Using a film scanner to directly scan the negatives is a much better choice. I haven't done this, but heard people reporting that results are not as good as scanning directly from slides.
For the first time using a scanner, take a perfect (whatever it means to you) original to play with the scanner for a while and observe the effects of different settings, and take notes. Read the manual. If you have access to other computers, especially if the computer used for scanning is not your everyday computer, take the scanned image to be viewed in another computer that you are familiar. Different terminals have very different visual effects. (Among all computers, I found Silicon Graphics workstation is THE best.)
For beginners, I'd advise using the software's automatic settings in which the software determines the exposure, brightness and contrast according to the preview image. In most cases, it does a better job than an inexperienced. Many software provide you, in one way or another, an access to each color channel. Don't open this can of worms unless you really know what you are doing. Leave it to "digital artists".
For more advanced, you don't want to hear from me :-) Over time, generating consistent results is important. The best is to stick with the same set of hardware and software, and develop a set of "standard" settings. Then for each individual image, vary slightly according to the image from these "standard" settings.
Most image processing software has a "sharpen" feature build-in just for this purpose. For some software, picture sharpening needs some heavy computations and could be very slow for large images. I find that scanning the image to a larger size (at least double the final size) then scale it down generally generates satisfactorily sharp images, and the image looks more natural. For example, for web displaying purpose, 600x400 is generally an appropriate size, I scan the image at about 1500x1000 (that is, 1024dpi for slides and 300dpi for 4"x6" prints), and scale down the image by half, which gives me about the desired size, with some room for cropping.
If sharpening is necessary, a few things need to be taken care of in advance. One is retouching to get rid of specks and dust spots. The second is blurring to get rid of the effect of film grain. For slides scanned in high resolution (such as 1024dpi and above), film grains can be noticeable. Smooth-toned areas in the image, such as the cloudless sky, need to be blurred so to get rid of the grain structure.
After sharpening, other things can be fine-tuned. Most prominent things needed to be fine-tuned: brightness, contrast, color saturation, etc. The emphasis here is "fine-tune": do not attempt anything too dramatic. More often than not, excessive image manipulation result in disastrous effects, such as funny tonal graduations, and it is bad to your health too. :-)
Adobe' PhotoShop is currently the most comprehensive photo processing software. But my feeling is that it is "too much" for my humble purpose :-) I just want to do a little bit of polishing, and don't need much "smarts". I prefer a simpler software, for ease of use, and ease of mastering. I always think that mastering a procedure to do a really fine job is much more important than knowing more gimmicky features. The immense features in the menus of PhotoShop make me hesitate to jump in.
Besides, I live in the Unix world, and there is no much distinction to me between "for work" and "for play". I use xv on an SGI machine. I am working on a review for this program (or, software? What's the difference?! ;-))
Actually, the two formats are not equal. Each has its own advantages. GIF is more popular, fast to display, great for web's gimmicky graphic elements, but it is limited to 8-bit color, which, in my opinion, is not enough for color photography exhibit. JPEG format is 24-bit color, and interestingly, a same picture saved in JPEG format in general has much smaller size, thus offers faster loading. This benefit comes from the JPEG compression algorithm, whose other side is that there is quality loss in every generation. I think JPEG is the most suitable format for Web exhibition of photography works.
The simplest, and also the most boring way to create a hyperlink to an image file is directly anchoring the image file such as
This way, when the viewer clicked on the link, the image is plainly displayed against the default background of the web browser.
I found that displaying photos against a dark background generates a very pleasing visual effect. Therefore, it might be worth creating an HTML file for each image, and set the background color or even background image for the image. If an HTML page is to be created, there are several provisions (tricks) of the HTML can be exploited:
Consult a Web authoring guide for a more detailed explanation on how to set these up.
Displaying the artwork itself is also an art. It is really a personal choice or taste. Just one thing to keep in mind: some folks using modem to surf the net, and some folks surf the net from within a "firewall": data transferring speed can be very slow, and thus it is best to keep a page as simple as possible.
Please note that the reviews here are very subjective and personal. Comments welcome.