Professional results from cheap desk-top scanners
| Category: PC KNOW HOW | Date: 2003-05-29 |
More and more of us are doing our own scanning, but the finished results will depend very much on your technique and understanding of how a scanner works. The following tips have been compiled as a result of “getting it wrong” over the years.
1. Calibrate your monitor using the supplied Gamma or set-up software Doing this will mean that what you see on screen is roughly what you will get in print or on the net.
3. Clean the scanner bed with glass cleaner. Every single scratch or piece of dust will need to be retouched out, so clean the scanner first.
6. Don’t use cheap scanners for images being used bigger than same size. Know your scanner’s limitations. If you are going to use an image a lot bigger, say more than 120% bigger than the original, have it scanned professionally.
7. Don’t use your scanner’s automatic settings. Experiment, but start out using a Gamma setting of 1.8 for print and 2.2 for web use. A scanner will try to average tones, so a contrasty image will be flattened and a flat one boosted. It is better to try to reproduce the image as it is supposed to be by setting the gamma manually.
8. Always use Unsharp Masking (USM). “Unsharp masking” is the trade term for a standard technique that printers use to sharpen images by accentuating the differences between adjoining areas of significantly different hue or tone. You can apply this same sharpening technique to your images with the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop. Suitable starting settings are Radius: 1.5, Amount: 120%, Threshold: 5. Highly detailed images such as line art, require a Threshold setting of 3, whereas portraits look best with a setting between 5 to 9.
9. Save as TIFF or JPEG. TIFF is the industry standard and includes a little bit of lossless file compression (LZW). JPEG will compress even more, but there will be a slight loss of quality. If in doubt, use TIFF or save as JPEG once all image editing has been done and use the “High Quality” option within Photoshop. Don’t keep resaving and editing a JPEG image as the loss of quality is cumulative.
By using these techniques I managed to use a $100 scanner to produce an image suitable for an A4 front cover. But if in doubt leave your scanning to a repro house. They have far more experience, better scanners and will deliver the best results.
About the author.
Background: Steve Nichols is a freelance journalist. He edits a free monthly e-zine for business communicators everywhere. See
http://www.cib.uk.com/ezine/ for details and to subscribe.
steve@infotechcomms.co.uk
http://www.infotechcomms.co.uk
1. Calibrate your monitor using the supplied Gamma or set-up software Doing this will mean that what you see on screen is roughly what you will get in print or on the net.
3. Clean the scanner bed with glass cleaner. Every single scratch or piece of dust will need to be retouched out, so clean the scanner first.
6. Don’t use cheap scanners for images being used bigger than same size. Know your scanner’s limitations. If you are going to use an image a lot bigger, say more than 120% bigger than the original, have it scanned professionally.
7. Don’t use your scanner’s automatic settings. Experiment, but start out using a Gamma setting of 1.8 for print and 2.2 for web use. A scanner will try to average tones, so a contrasty image will be flattened and a flat one boosted. It is better to try to reproduce the image as it is supposed to be by setting the gamma manually.
8. Always use Unsharp Masking (USM). “Unsharp masking” is the trade term for a standard technique that printers use to sharpen images by accentuating the differences between adjoining areas of significantly different hue or tone. You can apply this same sharpening technique to your images with the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop. Suitable starting settings are Radius: 1.5, Amount: 120%, Threshold: 5. Highly detailed images such as line art, require a Threshold setting of 3, whereas portraits look best with a setting between 5 to 9.
9. Save as TIFF or JPEG. TIFF is the industry standard and includes a little bit of lossless file compression (LZW). JPEG will compress even more, but there will be a slight loss of quality. If in doubt, use TIFF or save as JPEG once all image editing has been done and use the “High Quality” option within Photoshop. Don’t keep resaving and editing a JPEG image as the loss of quality is cumulative.
By using these techniques I managed to use a $100 scanner to produce an image suitable for an A4 front cover. But if in doubt leave your scanning to a repro house. They have far more experience, better scanners and will deliver the best results.
About the author.
Background: Steve Nichols is a freelance journalist. He edits a free monthly e-zine for business communicators everywhere. See
http://www.cib.uk.com/ezine/ for details and to subscribe.
steve@infotechcomms.co.uk
http://www.infotechcomms.co.uk
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