Avoiding the Scanning Blues: A Desktop Scanning Primer
Authors: Taz Tally
Venue:  (2000)

From the Book:PREFACE: PREFACE The title of this book, Avoiding the Scanning Blues, tells the tale of what this book is about: preventing as many problems as possible when it comes to creating, viewing, and printing images that are created and edited with desktop publishing equipment and software. The keys to good quality images involve using the proper tools and techniques both prior to, during and after an image is scanned. One of the fundamental tools explored and developed in this book is a technique I call "visualization scanning:' This involves previsualizing how a scanner will recreate an image. To effectively use this technique, you must be thoroughly familiar with the images a scanner can create and the building blocks of those scanned images. If you know where you want to take an image, and the steps it takes to get there, you will be able to make the best decision when setting up a scanner for image capture, or deciding how you want to alter an image after it is scanned. Fundamentals through the details In this book you will first get a solid grounding in the fundamentals of scanners, scanned images and the techniques of scanning. You will learn about the building blocks of scanned images and the challenges that face us when we want to scan an image. These fundamentals will give you the necessary information to help you understand why you perform a technique rather than just teaching you a technique. This critical background information will not only provide you with confidence when you scan, but will also help you troubleshoot problems later on. After covering all the necessary background information,youwill learn all the critical tools and skills to accomplish professional-level scans of your images. You will learn to calibrate your scanner, evaluate and set highlight and shadow points, and properly control image brightness and contrast. You will also learn advanced techniques for applying unsharpmask and avoiding color casts. You will learn how to scan poor quality images and images that have been previously scanned. You will learn to scan all types of media including reflective, positive transparencies and negative transparencies. This book even covers techniques to use in the post-scan environment in image editing applications such as Adobe Photoshop. Here you will learn how to protect your images during image editing and even improve upon images that were poorly scanned with techniques such as post-scan color correction. Real-world images for real-world scanning! Included with this outstanding step-by-step scanning book are real images to be scanned. These sample images include line art, a variety of detail images, images to be corrected, contone photographs, and screened images. So, rather than just learning general principles, you have the opportunity to work with the same real-world images used as examples in this book. Real-world practice images included in this book Actual practice images for scanning Black-and-white and colored line art images Simple and complex images Low-quality images to be corrected Grayscale contone photograph Color contone photograph Screened images Practice with the same real-world images used in this book The truth about desktop scanning I has been often asserted that good quality images cannot be produced with a desktop scanner. While this was once true, it is no longer. Today's desktop scanning equipment and software rivals the best made. It only falls to us, the operators, to learn how to use these tools to their best advantage. This book is designed to do just that! Enjoy! Taz Tally 2000 The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player