Getting Images onto Your Computer

There are a number of different ways to turn your conventional photography into a digital format computers can understand:

Developing Services: Many companies which develop and print film can also send your pictures to you on a floppy or CD.
Scanners: They are coming down in price, and there are even new scanners which are dedicated to working with just slides or standard photographic prints.
Digital Cameras: These work much like a conventional camera, but take the picture digitally. Media Services lends digital cameras. [Is this true for the general MHC community?]

Here are some pointers which may help when dealing with scanned or digitally photographed images:

Use Photoshop's Image Size dialog to set the image's resolution to 72 dpi before doing any work on it.
When scanning black-and-white photos, it is best to set the scanning software for greyscale, not color.
Because a scanned photo will often have graininess or banding, it is helpful to scan the image at double-size (200%) and then use Photoshop's Image Size command to reduce it to 50%. Make sure you are in RGB or Greyscale mode first.