Picture Perfect Scans

Posted on August 11, 1999

in Visual Design

by Ryan Mayberry (Ryan)

Rated 3.55 (Ratings: 3) (Add your rating)

Want more?

More articles in Visual Design
More articles by Ryan

Ryan Mayberry

Member info | Full bio

User since: June 04, 1999

Last login: June 14, 1999

Articles written: 7

Your uncle's friend's cat knows this dude who sells fur hats and wants you to put together a web site. Except, all you have to work with is photos from an old battered-up catalogue. Here are a few tips you can follow in PhotoShop to make your scans come out crystal clear on the web. Apply these tips by themselves or as a group as needed.

The Scan: Using any off the shelf scanner, scan your images into PhotoShop. If possible scan them in at about 200% of their original size. Of course your not going to be using these huge images in your site, but it is generally easier to remove dust and scratches from larger images than smaller ones and will give you more flexibility with any digital altering you may want to do.

Stamp it, don't scratch it: One often-neglected tool in PhotoShop is the Rubber Stamp Tool. This tool is very easy to use and can help you remove nasty scratches and large foreign objects from your images. Select the Rubber Stamp Tool and while holding down the ALT [option on mac] key click on your image where you want the Stamp to take the impression from. Now release the key and use the tool like a paintbrush over any area you want to 'stamp it out'. Play around with this tool first until you become comfortable with how it works. Then go to town on your images.

Despeckle and Sharpen: Notice how sometimes after you scan your image it looks a little rough or grainy? This can be caused by the texture of paper you were scanning and can sometimes be very noticeable. One fast way of cleaning this up is by using the Despeckle and Sharpen filters. FILTERS > NOISE > DESPECKLE, will clean your image but may also leave it looking a little out of focus. You can counter the focus with FILTER > SHARPEN > SHARPEN. Note: If you plan on doing more work to the image it may be a good idea to leave the sharpening until you're done.

Brightness and Contrast: Ever wonder why some images look a little flat or lack life after they are scanned. A big reason for this is not having enough contrast between shadows and highlights. An easy way to give your online images a little kick is to pump up contrast slightly to darken your shadows and bring focal points into more light. The brightness/contrast control can be found under IMAGE > ADJUST > BRIGHTNESS / CONTRAST.

Resize and Sharpen: You've adjusted the contrast, cleaned the scratches now it's time to give your image one last tweak before exporting. A nice fast way to bring that image into focus and give it an ultra clean look is to shrink the size down to where you need it and give it a quick sharpen. FILTER > SHARPEN > SHARPEN.

Now you can save your image and dump it onto your page. Remember to play with your compression settings to find the perfect amount for your image, any more loss to quality at this point will result from poor saving practices or poor file format choices. For some information on file formats and optimization see the evolt article Optimizing Art for the Internet.

9 comments on this article. Log in to add your comment |

Submitted by isaac on August 12, 1999 - 18:58.

another thing to try instead of, or before, you play with brightness/contrast, is the image > adjust > auto-levels. if it doesn't work as expected, just undo (ctrl-z) and do it manually with brightness/contrast. more often than not (especially with quick jobs) it will save you some time.

Submitted by MartinB on August 13, 1999 - 01:21.

The other thing you'll have to contend with if you're scanning printed material is nasty moire patterns caused by the fit between the scan pixels and the line screen (ie all the wee dots used to print ink onto paper) of the original pic. Some scanners (notably UMAX) have a descreen feature, but if yours doesn't, you're going to have to play around with your Gaussian blur (Filter > Blur). The exact settings will vary, according to the original screen - art prints have much finer screens than magazines, which in turn are way about newspaper quality. Once the dots are away, you'll need to resharpen. Remember to do this when the image is still at its largest size - leave resizing it down until right at the end.

Submitted by MondoMo on September 21, 1999 - 08:37.

Instead of scanning in 200%, you should scan in a higher resolution (double resolution). On some scanners scanning in a resolution different from 100% will start a resizing-algorithm. I prefer to do my resizing manually: I like to controll whats happens to my image.

Submitted by jedrek on February 1, 2000 - 16:25.

One thing that you can try to do is use the Unsharp Mask tool instead of Sharpen. It gives you much more control. You can even sharpen in a way as not to sharpen grain and dust, just sharpen what you need.

Submitted by Hope on February 20, 2000 - 23:23.

If you're scanning a previously printed piece and get a bad moire pattern, try this: lay the print at an angle on the scanner glass. You might have to play with the angle to get it right and you'll have to "straighten it out" in photoshop (or your image editor of choice). When despeckling alone has failed me, this has helped.

Submitted by Anonymous on March 1, 2000 - 19:48.

I was a Photoshop operator in another life, not so long ago, and I'd like to briefly add that brightness and contrast and, to a lesser extent, auto levels, are relatively destructive things to do to your scan. The *curves* command has much more room for fine-tuning. I'm not talking about altering the individual channels with curves to affect color, though that can be done, I'm just talking about working on the composite RGB channel. Not enough room for a full explanation, but basically the curve tool is talking about taking existing pixel values (dark, light) and remapping them to new values. From a cheap scanner, you most often want to enhance the contrast. This means you want to create a composite RGB channel curve that looks like an S--so the darks are getting darker and the lights are getting lighter. Obviously, you can also do things like make the midtones lighter while keeping the highlights about where they are and darkening the shadows only a little. Maybe if there's interest I'll post a little tutorial.

Another tip...

Submitted by nmyers on April 12, 2001 - 10:54.

... I often find that when I have a washed out photo, that duplicating it onto another layer, and then playing with the layer modes and opacity can often do wonders.

Soft Light ahoy!

Submitted by spongepuppy on January 2, 2002 - 02:59.

Often, my scanner tends to was out the colours at the far ends of the luminance and saturation histogram. Often, I'll duplicate the original picture layer, blur the newly created layer, and set it's blending mode to "soft light". This generally increases the contrast and saturation of an image, while softening without having to resort to blurring.

tips for high resolution photos scans

Submitted by Heironymous on November 12, 2006 - 03:45.

I agree with many of the comments here. It's important not to use basic brightnest/contrast adjustments as they are very destructive. Seeing that some time has passed since this article was written some things have changed. If you can afford a scanner which offers 16-bit (aka 48bit) color that helps to maintain the integrity of the color even if you have to do some serious contrast/color adjusments. You can see this in effect here with these New York landmarks and NYC locations photos. I try to archive my scans at a fairly low contrast and add contrast as I need it. This is very important with high contrast or brightly lit scenes. Photoshop CS now offers a new kind of selective sharpening which is a great improvement over the old unsharp mask as you can adjust it to suit the specifics of the image...Most of what I have mentioned here applies to both black and white photography and color photos.

Start of page header

Other Fine Evolt.org Sites

Navigation Starts

Article Categories

Highest rated articles

Submit

Recent comments