The following information applies to flatbed scanners and Adobe Photoshop, and is meant to familiarize users with common commands/tools in various systems.
Flatbed Scanners
You will want to scan your original in one of the following modes depending on the image:
- Line Art: black and white only. No grays involved.
- Gray Scale: Continuous tone black and white artwork. Allows for grays.
- Halftone: Previously published original made up of dots (moire pattern).You may have a descreen option here. Can be color or black and white.
- RGB: red/green/blue additive color mode (if your final output to screen only)
- CMYK: Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/Black color mode (final output to print.)
1. A Preview Scan is the first command you want to execute to check your scan settings. You will also want to choose:
- Physical Size of Original (dimensions)
- Physical Size of Scan (dimensions) and Resolution
2. Often there is an Auto-Adjust option that will set your tonal values.
Adobe Photoshop Basics
Gamma correction: increasing the brightness of midtones without affecting highlights and shadows.
Histogram Plot: shows brightness distribution of image. To adjust, drag triangular handles: Black for shadows, Gray for midtones, White for highlights.
Tone Curve: moving the curve up will lighten the middle tones and vice versa. Descreening/Removing Moire Pattern: If your original comes from a newspaper or magazine, there will be a dot screen to remove. Blurring an image usually removes this. See Filtering.
Filtering an Image: Useful for low/high contrast pictures. You can soften the image by blurring or sharpen edges by sharpening.
Resizing and resampling Images: When you resize and want to retain the same resolution, leave on "resample image". If you just change the paper size without re-sampling, the dpi count is multiplied.
Other common software:
Photo Explorer, MS Picture It!, Corel Photo House, etc.
|
