Neverside

How do you scan good boxcovers?

Hey guys,
I am trying to scan some boxcovers for my friend for his website but the quality isn't really impressive. Are there any tips?

What's worse is when I try to shrink the image to about 120x200 (or even smaller), the image becomes really blur.

Any idea?

Jimmy

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Get a good scanner

Well besides the obvious issue of the quality of your scanner... the thing with scanning printed material such as magazines and in this case boxcovers, is that they have a grid of ink points. That grid most likely mismatches the grid of pixels that your scanner makes, which results in a pattern called "moire", as seen in this picture. Which i suspect pays a role because it gets ugly when you resize it.
Good scanners and scanning software have an option to "flatten" a grid like that. There you have to enter the lpi (lines per inch) of the grid, which is usually about 175 for digital offset print.

If you're scanning at the highest possible resolution and you made these settings, or if your scanner doesn't allow such settings, then i guess there's not much left to do but find someone who has a better scanner who will scan it for you.

Although if you don't have a flattening option but you can scan at a considerable resolution / size, you might be able to remove a bit of this moire with the noise --> median filter. But that will also remove detail. Still, if they're meant to be shown at small sizes, you don't need the tiniest details so it's worth a shot.

Last edited by SlappyMcCracken, August 18th, 2004 01:47 AM (Edited 1 times)

Thanks for the reply!

Ok, I solved the problem...well, sort of.

At first, I saved the scanned image into jpg file which looks nice when it's nice a big. But when I resize it, the quality is really "blur".

So, I saved the image in bitmap and it's much better now! hehe

Jimmy

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ut a red poster board behind the object or w.e i use black posetboards... or w.e . it makes it look really good.