Avoiding The Scanning Blues: A Desktop Scanning Primer - Softcover

Taz Tally

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130405485 ISBN 13: 9780130405487

Publisher: Prentice Hall (Higher Education Division, Pearson Education), 2000

Synopsis

The complete, practical professional's guide to making the most of your scanner -- Mac or PC! In Avoiding the Scanning Blues, legendary graphic arts trainer Taz Tally offers thorough explanations and step-by-step instructions that can help you make the most of your scanner -- no matter what platform, software, or output medium you're using. From scanning fundamentals to sophisticated color, calibration, and Tally's "Top 100 Line Art and B&W Photo Scanning Tips," this is the expert scanning guide every graphics professional needs. Avoiding the Scanning Blues is supported by a companion Web site containing images from the book, resources, bonus Tips & Tricks, links to leading hardware and software manufacturers, updates, and more.

About this title

Review:

The human eye can perceive about 5,000 shades of gray, points out Avoiding the Scanning Blues: A Complete Guide to Desktop Scanning. By the time a real-life scene has been photographed, printed on photographic paper, and scanned, it has been reduced to 250 shades of gray, at best. Laser printing usually reduces the palette further, to 125 shades. The challenge of the professional graphic artist is to use the scanner properly to minimize the effect of this technical limitation. With an emphasis on that goal, this book explains techniques for professional scanner use. It treats scanners as the powerful tools that they are, and not merely toys for attaching photographs in e-mail messages. This book is one of very few that take scanner work seriously, and it's definitely worth buying if you're a professional or avid amateur scanner of images.

Most chapters begin with clear explanations of concepts; the logic being that you can't get far as a manipulator of images if you don't know what terms mean, or what effects various pieces of the imaging chain have on the end product. The style is concise and readable (although, for clarity, mathematical equations should have been set out from the body text), and illustrations ("good" and "bad" sample photos, plus screen shots) enhance the text. Easy-to-follow how-to passages appear throughout, most of which have to do with aspects of Adobe Photoshop. The book challenges you to scan practice images that have problematic visual characteristics and fix some intentionally bad originals. --David Wall

Topics covered: Scanning for professionals, with an emphasis on getting the highest possible printed product from the originals at hand; in-depth coverage of evaluating an image to be scanned, performing the scanning process, and performing filtering and other manipulations on newly digitized images; also, the specifics of transparency and negative scanning, as well as of digital image theory.

From the Inside Flap:

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, you will 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

About this edition

• Publisher: Prentice Hall (Higher Education Division, Pearson Education)
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0130405485
• ISBN 13: 9780130405487
• Binding: Paperback