Nadinea
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Jekav, a question for myself and for other inquiring minds that might like to know. Do you have any general advice for getting good quality scans
for sending to the gallery? I know that folks have different kinds of equipment, so it would be hard to be very specific. I think I'm doing
ok, but would like a bit of advice on maybe doing better. Jekav, keep
it simple, I ain't no computer wiz.(llaugh) Jill
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Jekav
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Sure! I wrote something down which you might find interesting. It became quite a huge piece of text. Hope it does make any sense to you. If you still have questions, please do ask me!
For start their are two methods of digitalizing a drawing. One is to scan it, the other one is to take a picture of is. Both methods can give good results.
When you scan a drawing you're likely to get more contrast in the digital image, sometimes this will negatively effect the result. The image is very sharp and mostly has a lot of detail.
When taking a picture you have to be careful not to get to little contrast. You should take the picture with enough environment light, and maybe using the flash. It's more difficult to get a sharp result. Don't move the camera, use enough light and don't zoom to much and the result can be as sharp as a scan. Another this to worry is the exposure time. Because the drawing mostly contains a lot of white (the paper) the camera chooses a shorter exposure time then it should and the result could end up to dark (gray paper). With some camera's you can set exposure time manually, if you cannot, you have to fix it in some software.
When you use a scanner, there are a few things you can set (how it's done depends on the scanner software). You can choose if you want to scan in colour, grayscale or black and white (the last on perhaps not all scanners have). You should never choose black and white, because the result is crappy (the colour gray is just black with white pixels in between). When you have a gray pencil drawing you could choose grayscale (this will result in a smaller file size then colour). Sometimes there is still a little colour in a gray drawing, so sometimes you might prefer to scan in colour anyway.
The second thing you can set is the dpi (dots per inch) value. This means how much detail the scanner should save. For the gallery you don't need a very high value. If you have an A4 paper size you'll should choose something like 70 to 100 dpi. If you want to use the image for printing (to publish it in a book or a magazine, or a poster) you should choose a higher value. High quality printing is something like 360 dpi (a poster is less) so if you want to print it 1:1 then your scan should also be 360 dpi (probably the maximum of the scanner).
Saving the image
Depending on the scanning software, the image is saved directly or it is opening in a image editing program. In the first case you should be able to set the saving setting in you scan software. The best format to save you file is JPEG (when you want high quality result you could consider TIFF). When you save a JPEG, you will (in most programs) be able to set the saving quality. Higher quality means higher file size, so you have to make a decision. When uploading your image in the gallery it does not save it in the highest quality possible (because of the bigger size). The setting in the gallery are on 70 on a scale between 0-100 (0 for low quality and 100 for high quality).
Edit you image:
You can adjust contrast, brightness, colour balance, and much more inside software. You can use photo editing software for this. There are many programs which can do the job, maybe you already have something on your pc (packed with the scanner or camera). You might want to try and play around a bit with different settings to try making the result better.
Resizing when uploading (this might get a little to technical....)
When you upload an image in the gallery, it is resized when it is larger as 700 x 1000 pixels. To make it fit in the layout. It uses an algorithm to calculate the new pixels, because you have to take surrounding pixels to determine the new pixel colour. When the uploaded image is significant larger then the resizes size, I suppose the algorithm will do a better job as when it is almost the destined size, because there are more pixels to mean. This algorithm does not simply linear mean the pixel values, but uses a more complex method. Still I think when resizing from lets say 800 px wide to 700, this will give worse quality when resizing from 1600 to 700 px. I did not really see a clear lack of quality duo to this, but still you might consider it when uploading. On the other hand the quality of the final images are probably not high enough to even bother on this effect.
last but not least
Different hardware will give different results! A new and good scanner will definitely give a better result then a 8 year old one. Really the scanners today (even the cheaper ones) will give a much better results as scanners 5 to 8 years old. For camera's the same thing, a camera on a mobile wont give the same results as a brand new reflex camera.
Good luck!
modified by Jekav at 29-01-2007 at 22:40:43(GMT+1:00)
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