[Ham-Computers] Re Problem Scanning Old QSL Cards

[Duane Fischer, W8DBF]

Some excellent advice, thanks to all!	
	
Last evening I came to the conclusion it had to be the cards themselves, not the
scanning causing the problem. A friend was here and could not see much of
anything on these old cards that corresponded to what showed on the CRT. I gave
him a fairly powerful magnifying glass to examine the cards with. Then he could
see the smudges were actually on the card. It seems to be simply old ink from a
typewriter that has gotten transfered from the original letter to the white
portions of the card that are the background. I suspect the only way to get rid
of it is by having someone who can see, obviously, use a photo editing program
to remove those ink residue marks. 	
	
Having never done this, I suspect I would need to save the scanned image in .bmp
format, get somebody to do the editing and then save it back as a .jpg or .gif?	
	
These QSL cards are from the thirties and will be going up on the HCI web site
in the future. Because of this, I will need to reduce the amount of space they
occupy and suspect I am going to need to compress them. Correct? If not, what
should I do with the final image to make it small enough in Kb to load quickly,
with minimal degradation of the image and loss of detail?	
	
Thanks. 	
	
Duane W8DBF