Better desk top scanning

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 Adobe 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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: 50-100%, Threshold: 5-7. Highly detailed images such as line art, require a Threshold setting of 3, whereas portraits look best with a setting between 5 to 9.

posted by Steve Nichols @ 7:19 PM Comments: 0