Real World Scanning and Halftones: The Definitive Guide to Scanning and Halftones from the Desktop - Softcover

Blatner, David; Roth, Steve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566090938 ISBN 13: 9781566090933

Publisher: Peachpit Pr, 1993

Synopsis

Here's a book that will save you time and money as you master the digital halftone process, from scanning images to tweaking them on your Mac to image setting them. You'll learn about optical character recognition software, gamma control, sharpening, moires, PostScript halftones, Photo CD, and image-manipulating applications like Photoshop and PhotoStyler.Many people who are proficient on their PCs and Macs don't have a clue about scanners. Others have tried to use scanners, or incorporate scans into their documents, but with less-than-satisfactory results. Now there's a book that explains - in clear, simple language and with profuse illustration - what people need to know about scanners, and about the related subject of halftones as well. Written by desktop publishing gurus David Blatner and Stephen Roth, Real World Scanning and Halftones covers topics from image acquisition through high-quality output. Not only does the book explain in step-by-step detail which buttons to push to get high-quality images, it provides the conceptual underpinnings so users can become proficient on their own. While the book is general in nature, it also refers to the most popular programs and scanners by example, providing users with the detailed information they want while maintaining the conceptual overview they need. One of the central topics of Real World Scanning and Halftones is digital halftoning - explaining how color and gray-scale images are reproduced on the printed page using laser printers and imagesetters. This explanation has never been adequately provided in one place in the depth users need to understand the topic. In addition, the book demystifies the world of OCR, or optical character recognition.

About this title

Review:

This highly useful, detailed guide helps desktop-publishing and other design professionals produce the best possible scans and halftones from their images. The first section focuses on scanning, first featuring explanations of such terms as spi (samples per inch), bit depth, optical and interpolated resolution, and dynamic range. The authors even advise you on buying and cleaning scanners. Next they detail the elements of good scans and how to fix less-than-perfect ones, helping you figure out what sort of file formats and resolutions to use in your work, how to do tonal and color corrections, and how to sharpen and compress images. Finally, the discussion turns to Web and printer output and to OCR technology and PhotoCD images.

The section on halftones teaches you how to produce decent halftone images, first by explaining how halftones work and then by explaining such issues as frequency, gray levels, spot variation, spot gain, spot shapes, and the role of printers and software in creating halftones. There's also a discussion of stochastic screening and how to create blends and reduce moiré and other patterns. The last chapters here help you fine-tune your halftone settings and learn a bit about PostScript operators for halftones and scanning.

The third and last section focuses on using image applications to work with scans, tonal and color corrections, and halftones. This discussion includes Adobe Photoshop, Micrografx Picture Publisher, Corel Photo-Paint, Ulead PhotoImpact, Equilibrium's DeBabelizer, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia FreeHand, CorelDRAW, Adobe PageMaker, and QuarkXPress. The authors also look at a few scanning applications and offer tips on using them.

Throughout the book the authors provide plenty of images and screen shots to illustrate their points, and a full-color section helps bring some of these examples to life. There's lots of technical discussion, but since each chapter builds on the previous ones and the basic terminology is put forth clearly, you can leave off wherever you wish and still have a lot of new knowledge to apply to your scans and halftones. --Kathleen Caster

About the Author:

David Blatner is a Seattle-based consultant specializing in QuarkXPress and Photoshop. He is the author or co-author of The QuarkXPress Book, Real World Photoshop, The Joy of Pi, and Real World QuarkImmedia, and he also writes for Macworld magazine. He lectures around North America and Japan on the subject of desktop publishing.Glenn Fleishman lives in Seattle, where he commutes daily on the Internet. His start in typesetting led--directly and indirectly--to graphic design, system administration, Web development, online retailing, and Web advertising confernces. He writes a regular column for Adobe Magazine.Steve Roth, creator of the Real World series, has authored, co-authored, and/or produced several of teh seminal books on desktop publishing. He is the CEO of Thunder LIzard Productions, which produces the Photoshop Conference, QuarkXPress Conference, Web Design Conference, and several other technology events.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peachpit Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1566090938
• ISBN 13: 9781566090933
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296