Avoiding the Scanning Blues: A Desktop Scanning Primer

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.