Scanning Around With Gene: Five Years on a Flatbed

Gene Gable

When I discovered that today marks my five-year anniversary writing a column here at CreativePro.com, I immediately fell into a dark funk. I generally dislike milestones because they serve as a reminder of dreams unfulfilled, paths not taken, books not read, money not saved, pounds not lost and any number of other pessimistic conclusions one can draw. It hasn’t been the best five years of my life by any measure, and much of it I would rather forget.

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But one of the few highlights of the past five years and the thing that has often kept me connected during periods of reclusion has been writing these more than 75 columns. It’s been a lot of fun and I really appreciate all the comments I’ve gotten from people over the years, even the one that called me a “disgusting liberal idiot who doesn’t know the difference between a quail and pheasant.” He was right.

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I tried to think of any number of ways to do a retrospect and realized that any attempt to re-visit five years worth of writing would not only bore everyone to death, but probably turn out to be unnecessarily painful for me.

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But then I realized I have learned at least a few things in five years. Not about anything important like life, the universe, and everything. No, I’ve learned the difference between a quail and a pheasant, and I’ve also learned about scanning and re-touching images. So here is my best attempt at imparting that knowledge, along with some of my favorite images from past columns.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
Choosing a Scanner
Of all the technologies we take for granted these days, nothing has come down in price and gone up in quality the way scanners have. (The first flatbed scanner I bought, in 1989, was an Abaton 16-bit black and white model that cost $2,500.) But there still is a wide range of quality out there, so when I began my column I turned to the late, great color expert Bruce Fraser. Bruce told me it wasn’t necessary to buy a professional model because I’d get nearly the same results from a $99 Canon Canoscan. So that’s what I bought. It’s small enough to fit in my briefcase — I sometimes travel with it so I can scan on the road. Because it’s USB powered, it doesn’t need an external power source, which is great when connected to my portable Mac PowerBook.

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A few years into things I upgraded to a slightly better Canon scanner with a transparency attachment. I’ve used that feature only one time, and it adds a lot of bulk to the scanner, so I still prefer the skinny little first model. (Its equivalent now sells for about $49 and is probably even better.)

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Hardware Add-Ons
One of the keys to good scanning seems simple, but it’s not that easy to achieve: The item should be very flat on the glass. For that reason I set up my scanner in an area where there’s lots of room on either side, and I place large books or other flat items on each side of the scanner so they’re level with the scanner glass. That way if you have an over-sized object (like a book), the part that’s hanging out of the scanner bed isn’t falling down.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
To apply pressure to the scanner lid so it squishes down whatever I’m scanning, I have a 5-pound lead weight handy to set on top. Most people use a heavy book, which is fine, but pound-for-pound, there’s nothing like lead!
The other hardware add-on I couldn’t live without is a black rubber sheet the size of the scanner bed. An astute reader opened my mind to the simple concept that there would be less show-through when scanning anything printed on both sides if I used a black background instead of the white background that comes on the scanner lid. The black background makes for much better scans.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
One caution, however, when using anything but white as a background for your scans. If you use the automatic level settings, or you’re depending on the scanner to automatically find the edges of your document and crop it accordingly, you may run into trouble because the scanner’s looking for white around the edges of your document.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
Scanner Software
I’ve tried just about every possible scanner application, and I almost always come back to scanning directly into Adobe Photoshop through a scanner plug-in. I tried VueScan, which is famous for supporting older and unusual scanner models, but it’s more complicated than I need, and my test scans weren’t as good as those I got directly from Photoshop. (This may be because I didn’t tweak the settings enough — in VueScan, there are many things you can tweak.)

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
The thing about scanners, especially older ones like mine, is that they’re incredibly slow. There are FireWire models, but they tend to be very expensive. So when I have a bunch of scans to make and need to be working on something else, I use the scanning software utility Canon bundles with the scanner. This simple software works with the buttons on the front of the scanner so I can place something on the flatbed and push the “scan” button, then the machine scans the image and saves it to a file. You can pre-set resolution and other variables for each of the buttons, which I’ve set to my most frequent needs.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.

Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
One key to good scanning results is using a descreen feature. This setting helps prevent moiré patterns and other artifacts when you’re scanning things that were half-tone printed (which is most of what I scan). As far as I can tell, neither Photoshop nor any other software includes a descreening filter. (It is a feature of VueScan, which applies it during image capture.) Without descreening as part of the scanner driver, I’d be fooling around with Photoshop’s noise filters and other effects, trying to minimize the visible dot pattern that’s picked up when scanning printed material.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
Either by scanning to a file with the scanner software, or directly into Photoshop through a plug-in, I capture my images in as raw as a form as I can. I turn off all automatic correction features (levels, contrast, etc.), and I don’t allow the software to sharpen the image.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
Although my material for this column ends up at 72dpi, I usually scan at 300 to 400 dpi. I like having a larger image to work with and keep images in their highest resolution until I’m ready to send them to the editor.
I also employ a copy stand for larger items, which I then photograph with a digital camera. It’s much faster than scanning with a flatbed. But even with a good 6-megapixel camera, the detail and quality isn’t the same as a flatbed scanner. And unless you use a true SLR digital camera with a fixed focal-length lens, you get distortion around the edges. My copy stand uses 5200-degree fluorescent lights, so the colors are pretty good, but they need just as much work as the scanned images.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
Storing and Managing Images
I have a love/hate relationship with Apple’s iPhoto software. At first it seemed fine as an image database and browser. But as my library grew in size, iPhoto became slow and very hard to deal with. However, there are a few things I love about iPhoto, so I still sometimes bring a collection of scans into iPhoto, work with them, then export them to another program. It’s a frustrating process, but I haven’t found a single image-management tool that can do everything well.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
In iPhoto, for example, you can straighten images more easily than in any other program. And when you scan a lot you straighten a lot, since it’s nearly impossible to line up items perfectly on the scanner bed. I also like the sharpen feature in iPhoto, if only for the simple slider-bar functionality. Cropping is also very easy in iPhoto, as is general image browsing. But the level adjustments don’t do a good enough job, and of course there are very few other image-editing tools to work with. So it’s inevitable that my images end up in Photoshop at some time.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
For storing, organizing, and retrieving images I use Microsoft Expression Media, formerly known as iViewMedia. It’s a great image database of industrial strength, and it has some basic image-editing tools that are decent. For instance, the auto-enhance feature in Expression Media is the only one I use on a regular basis — it does a great job at setting levels and adding what always seems to be just-enough sharpness.

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Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
But Expression Media suffers from a very clunky interface; it often takes several steps to accomplish something you can do in one step in Photoshop. For example, cropping a photo brings up a separate Expression Media window where you make the crop and then apply it to the image. But for storing large amounts of images (my creativepro folder has more than 9,000 items in it), this software is great. It provides many different ways to browse images, annotate them, and print summaries and proof sheets.

Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.

Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.

Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.

Click on this image to go to the article in which it originally appeared.
Go to the next page for Gene’s image-editing process and many more of his favorite scans from past columns!

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