Ok, so hopefully you have the stuff you need.....and I didn't forget anything!
1. Take your USB and your paper map to an Officeworks that has a large format scanner. Anywhere else with a large format scanner will do too and some of the printing places (Minuteman etc.) may be a bit better for giving you more scanning options (which would eliminate one step). Officeworks worked for me though, so we'll stick with that.
2. Request your scan. Ideally you want it as an 8-bit TIFF file. The Officeworks I went to could only do a 24-bit version. This is a higher colour resolution than what is needed (8-bit), but that's ok, we'll fix that shortly......
3. Make sure you're near a BCF or something because the scan can take a little while......go for a browse! LOL
4. I hope you've installed IrfranView 'cause we're going to need that now..........
5. Plug in your USB stick and navigate to it using Windows Explorer. Locate your image and change the file name to one that represents the map you're creating.
6. Open IrfranView, go to the "File" tab and open your recently renamed image. A tip is to disable the preview checkbox, otherwise you will wait a minute or so as it generates a preview image from what is a very large file.
7. Now we want to reduce the overall image colour resolution as I mentioned earlier. We need to reduce this from the scanned image's 24-bit colour back to 8-bit..... Go to the "Image" tab and select reduce colour depth. From the next text box, you want to select "256 colours" and leave everything else as is.
8. Save your reduced image as a TIFF type file to a DIFFERENT location, somewhere you know where to find it. I created a Rooftop maps folder on my desktop and saved it in there so I knew where to find it later, and so I didn't mess with my original scan in case I needed it again later too.......which I did! (but hopefully by following this you wont!).
That's it for this step, more to come soon.......
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