[Images]Imagine That! (Page 4 of 5)


Do-It Yourself

Options include:

Using a scanner

Scanners are wonderful toys/tools. I have had the opportunity to work with a variety of scanners ranging from black & white hand scanners to a number of color desktop versions including (IMHO) the best in the world, the Scitex 342L. I have also been exposed to a few drum scanners.

In the high-end world of scanners (tens of thousands of dollars), I prefer flatbed scanners over drum scanners because of the necessity of production. Flatbed scanners will allow you to crank stuff out quickly with acceptable quality. They are more than adequate for scans for Web pages.

On the low-end side, there are flatbed and sheetfed scanners. Again, I prefer flatbeds. Prices for low-end scanners have dropped to as low as a few hundred (US) dollars.

When selecting a scanner, look for at least 24bit color and at least 300x600 optical resolution. Scanners can interpolate data (run math algorithms to perform best guesses of where data should go) to 4800x4800, but that is not the same as the maximum optical resolution. Scanners usualy come with bundled software which may include the scanning application, image-editing software, and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software.

Other scanner considerations are speed, number of passes, size of maximum scanning area, transparency or slide attachments (if necessary).

Calibration is another issue. Anyone can slap a photo on a scanner and slam it into the machine. Getting the scanned image to look like the original image (or, more accurately, what your brain perceives as the original image) is another story. There are several considerations such as: Calibrating a scanner can be a tricky process. Remember that you are seeing the image that you scanned through a monitor that must also be calibrated. This simply makes it more complicated.

I would reccommend getting your system calibrated using numbers rather than observation. One way to achieve this is to scan samples of something where the color is known, like swatches from a Pantone Prosess Color Imaging Guide. Check the values of the scanned swatches in an application like PhotoShop where the values of the image are displayed accurately regardless of how they appear on your monitor and tweak your scanner settings from there.

I would like to stress that calibrating a new piece of equipment like a scanner is usually not a simple process and can take several hours or days (or weeks depending on how crazy you want to get with it), and that after the device is calibrated, it is likely to shift out of calibration over time (yet people do it every day).

This text is meant simply to provide a starting point and a direction to work in. Remember that there are millions of Web readers out there and each one has different settings on different machines. Do the best you can with the tools you have to use.

Using a digital camera

Digital cameras are also becoming popular as price drops. Many digital cameras save data in the form of JPEG files (lossy compression), so editing (for color correction or cropping) these files and saving them again in a JPEG format is going to result in a further loss of data.

As with scanners, the process of getting the image you see in your mind onto your monitor can be a lengthy bit of tweaking. Considererations include lighting, shadows, brightness, and contrast. Practice with various objects and become familiar with your equipment.

Taking pictures of products for a digital database is much different than capturing a football player being tackled. Start with simple shots of something that is measured for you (again, some kind of Color Matching System is good) and try to get as close to those values as you can in lighting that is known.

Again, as with the section on scanning, this text is meant simply to provide a starting point and a direction to work in. Do what you can with the tools at hand.

Creating your own art

Depending on you artistic abilities, you may want to try you hand at creating your own art. There are many benefits to this: There are many software packages for image creation and manipulation. They generally work in either raster or vector formats: Choosing a drawing program is a personal choice and many users tend to become devoted to their software application of choice. I feel that it is always good to be very familiar with a variety of applications. There are advantages to both raster- and vector-based programs. My personal choices are FreeHand, Illustrator, and PhotoShop.

Clip Art/Stock Photogaphy

Clip art is a fast way to acquire a large selection of images. There are a huge variety of clip art libraries to choose from. The Web has some sites that offer free clip art. Many companies offer disks and CDs that can contain just about any theme with prices ranging from next-to-nothing to thousands of dollars. Like most eveything else, you get what you pay for.

Before you purchase a clip art library, find out some things about the package:


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©Ken Kaleta 1997, 1998, 1999