Request for Scanning Advice

[James_Lewis]

I've got about a dozen vintage magazines, Pretty Girls, SE, CC, etc. They're in fair/good condition, with some missing/damaged covers. I recently got a scanner, but I never considered scanning these mags because the scanner I've got is very basic and I figured better scans were out there.

After checking though I realize that scans exist for some of these mags, but they're incomplete, so I figure I might as well try to scan what I've got. Problem is, as I said my equipment is very basic, and I've no experience scanning pictures. I've got an HP 1610 scanner/printer/copier and the "HP Director" software that came with it. I made some scans and put them into Photoshop CS3 to do some color correction, etc. Anyway, here's what I've done so far:

http://imageevent.com/jameslewis/scans

I used no compression on the jpegs, so they're rather large, up to 2.5 MB

I'd appreciate any advice as to the best way to proceed. Would different software produce better results or is that pretty much determined by the scanner itself?

[Leprechaun]

http://www.imageedition.com/scanfaq.htm

[James_Lewis]

http://www.imageedition.com/scanfaq.htm

I appreciate the link but it's not quite what I had in mind. As I said I have a limited amount of material and no intention of buying a better scanner than I have. I'm not looking to become expert in the subject, just to get some practical tips. Given the equipment I have, am I likely to be able to improve much on what I've produced so far?

[napoleansolo]

Hey James. Nice material!

You're going about things the right way - nice high resolution scans to start with. Photoshop gives you all you need to greatly improve the image. To my eyes you probably need to play around with the descreening option of the scanner to get the best out of it. Some settings will lose or distort detail or actual make the screen pattern worse.

I had a quick (20 minute) go at the cover scan - results below. Here's how I tackled it. Firstly from the Filter-Noise menu I used Unsharp Mask at a low setting (Amount 50%, Radius 1, Threshold 1) and applied it a couple of times (don't worry that this increases the grain of the scan). Then I used the Despeckle filter followed by the Dust and Scratches filter (Radius 1, Threshold 1) which will reduce the appearance of creases, small blemishes and specks. After that zoom into the image and use a combination of the Healing Brush and the Clone Stamp tool to manually remove visible creases and blemishes. It's a good idea to keep zooming in and out to check your progress. It's up to you how much you improve the image, but for authenticity it's probably best to limit yourself to correcting damage to the magazine rather than "enhancing" the image/subject itself (e.g. altering skin tones, removing wrinkles etc). For restoration it's usually tempting to go for quite extreme improvements, but usually the more subtle the changes, the better. Hope this helps.

Original scan:
http://img191.imagevenue.com/loc428/th_30170_PG55_Cover_123_428lo.jpg (http://img191.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=30170_PG55_Cover_123_428lo.jpg)

Retouched:
http://img19.imagevenue.com/loc701/th_31502_PG55_Cover_redux_123_701lo.jpg (http://img19.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=31502_PG55_Cover_redux_123_701lo.jpg )

Keep up the good work.

[will_u]

Since you already have Photoshop CS3, you have a pretty powerful tool to correct your scans.

The most basic piece of advice I can give you, and one that so many scanners do not do, is to simply put a piece of black paper behind the image you want to scan. The lid of your scanner is black for a reason. This prevents images on the other side from bleeding through. Look at a lot of the scans on this forum, and you'll see what I mean. You can see the type and outlines of images from the opposite side of the scanned image. Child's craft (construction) paper does well, and it's dirt cheap. This isn't an issue if you're scanning a loose image, but if it's still in the magazine, it will be very evident.

Next, scan larger than your final image size. I prefer to scan at 600 dpi for full-page images, without any descreening applied to the scan engine: I want to make the decisions for softening the image, not my scanner. Besides, it will scan much faster this way. This will yield a very large image. I prefer to then apply a very small Gaussian blur, anywhere from 2-5 pixels, to eliminate the halftone screen from the printed piece. I'll then resize to 300 dpi and use "Bicubic Sharper" for the resampling. This will yield a smaller, more workable image that still retains a good amount of detail. A helpful hint: zoom the image in and out in PS. If you don't see any moire patterns (strange color banding) when you do this, then you've softened the image enough.

And, by the way, do not save your scan as a JPEG at this point. This will very much limit the accuracy of color and other adjustments. Save the working scan as a PSD. Also, work in layers, so you can compare any changes you make to the original.

There are a lot of powerful tools in CS3 for color and level correction, but I rarely use any automatic functions. Open the "Levels" dialogue box, and look at the histogram. Usually, I leave the middle slider alone, but I'll bring the extreme sliders (light and dark) up to where they just touch the respective curves of the histogram, where the curves drop out to the bottom. This will generally make the image more vibrant and deeper, without losing highlight or shadow detail.

Color correction is just something you'll have to play with to get the feel. As a general rule, however, you do not want to decrease the saturation of a single color in the "Hue/Saturation" tool. I usually will use "Color Adjustment" or "Selective Color" (<---hint: ADD a complimentary color, don't subtract from one) to remove color casts, then make final adjustments to the saturation of the finished image using the "Master" selection of the "Hue/Saturation" dialogue box. If an image looks too red or too yellow (as will often be the case), it may simply be too saturated. Learning a little about the color theory of light will go a long way here.

On the final-sized image, you can then decide how much unsharpening to apply. I'll usually bump up 3-4 levels to "Threshhold" at only a few pixels width "Radius", 50-75% sharpening strength, depending on the image. Less is usually more. In the simplest sense, "Threshhold" is how much of the entire image will be sharpened. "0" will sharpen all pixels throughout the entire image. Adding levels to Threshhold will concentrate the sharpening to the more prominent edges of the image.

Photoshop CS has a lot of tools for making your scans even better, but these are the basics. Most of my scans in this forum can be seen in the Kirsten Imrie thread, but there are a few in the Nancy Sebastian thread as well.


Good Luck
"NacScaN"

....and, by the way, your first scans look fine!

[DubSalute]

Hi james.

Your scans look good to me, using the descreen option, to decrease the moire effect of printed matter, doesn't improve them on your scanner it infact makes them look poorer comparing to the one where you didn't use it on. Better like will_u says to not use it and to soften the images by using Photoshop to loose the moire effect, also like his tip about putting a thick black sheet of paper in the back to prevent the images on the other side showing though. By only using the softning on the images the text will stay sharp. You can do this by selecting the image and then using the effects/filters. You can crop/cut out a image in the same way by selecting the area that you want to keep and then cropping it to remove empty parts like on the bottom on your cover scan. (Image > Crop)

http://img164.imagevenue.com/loc710/th_70121_select_123_710lo.jpg (http://img164.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=70121_select_123_710lo.jpg)

I only used a Gaussian Blur of 2 pixels on the selected image and a Hue / Saturation of Hue 0 Saturation 105 and Lightness 5 on the complete scan below. Then resized it to a width of 1000 pixels at 200 dpi and saved it with a 92% (10 to 11 in Photoshop) quality jpeg compression setting. (359kB) Same settings for the cover. (289kB)(cropped the bottom part of)

http://img125.imagevenue.com/loc649/th_70133_PG55_01_1000_200dpi_jpg92procentcomp_123_ 649lo.jpg (http://img125.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=70133_PG55_01_1000_200dpi_jpg92proce ntcomp_123_649lo.jpg) http://img150.imagevenue.com/loc767/th_72814_PG55_Cover_1000_200dpi_jpg92procentcomp_1 23_767lo.jpg (http://img150.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=72814_PG55_Cover_1000_200dpi_jpg92pr ocentcomp_123_767lo.jpg)

Same image and effects at a width of 1200 pixels at 200 dpi and saved it with a 92% quality jpeg compression setting. (501kB)

http://img243.imagevenue.com/loc69/th_70126_PG55_01_1200_200dpi_jpg92procentcomp_123_ 69lo.jpg (http://img243.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=70126_PG55_01_1200_200dpi_jpg92proce ntcomp_123_69lo.jpg)

Best to use the same settings when possible for all the scans and not to adjust/spice them up to much IMHO.

http://img45.imagevenue.com/loc30/th_70127_PG55_01_1000_200dpi_jpg92procentcomp_soft er_123_30lo.jpg (http://img45.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=70127_PG55_01_1000_200dpi_jpg92proce ntcomp_softer_123_30lo.jpg)

You should see what you prefer, i advice to use some jpeg compression at the end you won't loose much visible quality and it will result in much smaller filesize to up and download.

Maybe some expert can give some more advice about the correct dpi and size i'm only a hobby scanner without a scanner a the moment :rolleyes:.

Succes, looking forward to seeing a complete PG #55 :)

[Tismaw]

Hello. Newbie member here. I do not currently own a scanner, but with the one I used to own my technique for scanning printed material was very simple: I wouldn't use "de-screening" but would simply scan the image at the highest available optical resolution for that particular scanner (600 DPI for my old scanner, I think). The resulting image would be very large (thousands of pixels in height and width). I would then resize the image in the image-editing program of my choice down to something more reasonable (example: 800 x 600 pixels). When you size it down, you will be offered choices about preserving aspect ratio ( = yes) and what sort of method for resizing to use ("resample" and "bicubic" are common choices---bicubic will give you a sharper picture, but may result in "artifacts", you be the judge, "resample" gives a smoother image). Save the re-sized image as a TIFF, and then maybe experiment with giving the TIFF a tad bit of sharpening effects using "unsharp mask" or "sharpen". Thumbsplus has some 1-click sharpening pre-sets that you can use, as did my trusty old Micrografx Picture Publisher, or
Irfanview. It might be best to leave Photoshop out of the loop until you can surmount its sharp learning curve.

[yefy]

I wouldn't say the learning curve in Photoshop is too big, if you just take babysteps, such as mentioned by napoleansolo and will_u. And there's always the easy-way-out: Auto adjustment of colours, brightness, contrast, etc. (I rarely use "auto" anymore though)

But, as already mentioned in this thread, I too would be careful with the scanner's descreening feature where the result is very much dependant on the quality of the scanner. If the descreening results are poor, I recommend the...

Bullet proof workaround to descreening:

Scan at 600DPI and resize to 150DPI-300DPI (also mentioned in this thread).

[haVEFun here]

Posted in the hustler vintage thread the pictorial of "sandy" (i.e. heather lere)
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=2166546&postcount=898 (http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=2166546&postcount=898)

Tried scanning the pages with a blackened paper on back, with a matt black cover book and a green cover book: little improvement gained: still “bleed through” of the image on the reverse side occurs, very annoying, especially when merging is needed; skin on left page, too “tanned”, on right page, too pink/purple, extremely difficult and time consuming (several hours needed) to get to an acceptable result.


http://ist1-1.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/1/_/_/_/1/1/7/i/6/17i6R/th_017443243_Sandyp96cl_123_592lo_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/16514249-original.html) http://ist1-2.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/1/_/_/_/1/1/7/i/6/17i6W/th_401744849_Sandyp97cl_123_36lo_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/16514254-original.html)

Any advice any one?

Also scanned the first separate picture from page 92 (92a) twice, at 300 and at 600 dpi , what looks better on a large and/or HQ monitor (graining/moire/flat look) ?


http://ist1-2.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/1/_/_/_/1/1/7/i/6/17i6Z/th_017468420_Sandypgs9293a300cl_123_958lo_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/16514257-original.html) http://ist1-4.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/1/_/_/_/1/1/7/i/7/17i72/th_017472908_Sandypgs9293a600cl_123_355lo_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/16514260-original.html)
thanks;

(I) have fun here.

[Darth Joules]

Tried scanning the pages with a blackened paper on back, with a matt black cover book and a green cover book: little improvement gained: still “bleed through” of the image on the reverse side occurs, very annoying, especially when merging is needed; skin on left page, too “tanned”, on right page, too pink/purple, extremely difficult and time consuming (several hours needed) to get to an acceptable result.


http://ist1-1.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/1/_/_/_/1/1/7/i/6/17i6R/th_017443243_Sandyp96cl_123_592lo_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/16514249-original.html) http://ist1-2.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/1/_/_/_/1/1/7/i/6/17i6W/th_401744849_Sandyp97cl_123_36lo_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/16514254-original.html)

I've found using black paper or thin cardboard behind a page can exacerbate bleed through. I primarily use a brown piece of thin card, similar colour to milk chocolate, which seems to yield the best result in minimizing bleed through. I use a much lighter shade of brown in some cases usually newspapers, but if the page or material is too thin then it's difficult to stop bleed through and you have to either live with it or painstakingly edit it all out.

As for your two halves having a different colour tones that can easily be fixed by changing the colour balance to manipulate the red, green, blue channels to remove the magenta cast (too pinkish as you said) from the right image. By too "tanned" I assume you mean the colours look too bright (oversaturated), using contrast/brightness can be used to fix it. Most art programs have colour balance and contrast/brightness tools. I use the Curves tool in Photoshop to do both, it's a very powerful tool! :thumbsup:

Example: Original scan on the left which looks terrible. On the right, edited mostly with the Curves tool (WIP), which looks much better now.

http://img128.imagevenue.com/loc489/th_077722953_test3_1_123_489lo.jpg (http://img128.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=077722953_test3_1_123_489lo.jpg)


Also scanned the first separate picture from page 92 (92a) twice, at 300 and at 600 dpi , what looks better on a large and/or HQ monitor (graining/moire/flat look) ?


http://ist1-2.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/1/_/_/_/1/1/7/i/6/17i6Z/th_017468420_Sandypgs9293a300cl_123_958lo_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/16514257-original.html) http://ist1-4.filesor.com/pimpandhost.com/1/_/_/_/1/1/7/i/7/17i72/th_017472908_Sandypgs9293a600cl_123_355lo_0.jpg (http://pimpandhost.com/image/16514260-original.html)
thanks;


Sadly your examples link to two tiny images.

Hopefully you're using a Descreen filter when scanning to reduce the Moire effect (banding). Though regardless of what dpi you're scanning at if you're picking up the printing pattern of the source material, you are scanning at a too higher resolution! Otherwise you'll get very grainy scans when the image is viewed at actual size and/or the dreaded Moire effect when it is reduced to fit someones screen size. But sometimes it's the scanner at fault, HP scanners are notoriously bad for scanning printed material.

I scan with a dpi anywhere between 150 dpi for poor quality material (e.g. newspapers) to 300 dpi for high grade material (e.g. Japanese glamour magazines). I never scan above 300 dpi as it is unnecessary, it's only with transparencies (slides) I go to very high dpi settings.

[tuffy]

Posted in the hustler vintage thread the pictorial of "sandy" (i.e. heather lere)
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=2166546&postcount=898 (http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=2166546&postcount=898)


Tried scanning the pages with a blackened paper on back, with a matt black cover book and a green cover book: little improvement gained: still “bleed through” of the image on the reverse side occurs, very annoying, especially when merging is needed; skin on left page, too “tanned”, on right page, too pink/purple, extremely difficult and time consuming (several hours needed) to get to an acceptable result.


http://img128.imagevenue.com/loc592/th_017443243_Sandyp96cl_123_592lo.jpg (http://img128.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=017443243_Sandyp96cl_123_592lo.jpg) http://img251.imagevenue.com/loc36/th_401744849_Sandyp97cl_123_36lo.jpg (http://img251.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=401744849_Sandyp97cl_123_36lo.jpg)


Any advice any one?

Also scanned the first separate picture from page 92 (92a) twice, at 300 and at 600 dpi , what looks better on a large and/or HQ monitor (graining/moire/flat look) ?


http://img212.imagevenue.com/loc958/th_017468420_Sandypgs9293a300cl_123_958lo.jpg (http://img212.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=017468420_Sandypgs9293a300cl_123_958 lo.jpg) http://img295.imagevenue.com/loc355/th_017472908_Sandypgs9293a600cl_123_355lo.jpg (http://img295.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=017472908_Sandypgs9293a600cl_123_355 lo.jpg)

thanks;

(I) have fun here.

I corrected the links to the original pics above. They are clickable now.

I hope this helps to watch the scans.

Tuffy

[deepsepia]

One trick for "bleed through"

Scan the reverse page, line up the reverse scan as a layer, and then subtract.

You'll have to play with the layer effects . . . this approach works well with a dark reverse image bleeding through on a white scan. No need for great resolution on the reverse scan, in fact a little blur will help

[haVEFun here]

Yes, thanks deepsepia, that is next step;

Thought of this layering already, have to figure it out how this works with the software that is available with the scanner ( read the rules: in this case the user guide ). regards haVEFun here

[Jism Jim]

Posted in the hustler vintage thread the pictorial of "sandy" (i.e. heather lere)
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=2166546&postcount=898 (http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=2166546&postcount=898)

skin on left page, too “tanned”, on right page, too pink/purple, extremely difficult and time consuming (several hours needed) to get to an acceptable result.


Dekoda made a very informative post about this. (http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/showpost.php?p=1169262&postcount=2)

[exfarmer]

I've been playing with the settings on my pdf to jpg software. I set it at 400dpi and this obviously caused the file sizes to increase.
What I need to know is does the quality justify the increased file size?
Here are a couple of samples and the file sizes vary but are around 1.2mb

http://img169.imagevenue.com/loc881/th_728326866_Pirate.Magazine.019_0099_123_881lo.jp g (http://img169.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=728326866_Pirate.Magazine.019_0099_1 23_881lo.jpg) http://img176.imagevenue.com/loc567/th_282732749_Pirate.Magazine.019_0090_123_567lo.jp g (http://img176.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=282732749_Pirate.Magazine.019_0090_1 23_567lo.jpg)

[Jism Jim]

In my opinion it is complete overkill. This only enlarges the pixels.
I think it would be better to decrease the pixel count instead of increasing it.

[deepsepia]

I've been playing with the settings on my pdf to jpg software. I set it at 400dpi and this obviously caused the file sizes to increase.
What I need to know is does the quality justify the increased file size?
Here are a couple of samples and the file sizes vary but are around 1.2mb

Based on what I'm seeing, something's off.

Scanning at 400 dpi should give you reasonably smooth fonts.

But what I see in your scan suggests something much coarser-- here's a section of your scan, look at the pixilation-- by my eye, this looks more like 25 dpi (assuming that the original printed fonts were smooth). Checking resolution issues on type is handy, because type isn't halftoned -- you're just looking at the resolving power of your scan/filesize combo, not issues in processing a halftone.

Its not the filesize -- at 1.4 meg, there are more than enough pixels to show this smoothly. Its something that occurred in the scan.

If you're converting this out of a PDF, my suspicion is that when the PDF was assembled it was done out of a very low res scan. Was this your PDF, or someone else's?

REmember, back in the way back, resolution and scans were tiny.

If I had to guess, I'd have said that this looked like it had originally been scanned to something like 100K. If you're looking at magazine scans for download as PDFs in the early 2000s, the whole PDF might be 4 or 5 meg . . . and if the resolution ain't in the PDF, you can't "get it back" when you convert to JPG.

http://img28.imagevenue.com/loc458/th_13305_FirefoxScreenSnapz009_123_458lo.jpg (http://img28.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=13305_FirefoxScreenSnapz009_123_458l o.jpg)

[exfarmer]

It's not a scan, it's a conversion from a pdf file (not my work) to jpeg. The program offers a dpi setting for the extracted images, I assumed the higher the setting the better the final image. Obviously I was wrong. :p

[deepsepia]

It's not a scan, it's a conversion from a pdf file (not my work) to jpeg. The program offers a dpi setting for the extracted images, I assumed the higher the setting the better the final image. Obviously I was wrong. :p

So, when you have a PDF like this, its basically just a bunch of JPGs in a PDF wrapper.

These JPGs were clearly scanned at low res, a long time ago.

If you have the full version of Acrobat, or some of the PDF inspection utilities, you can "unpack" a PDF and get access to the native graphics files that are in it.

They are the size that they are -- you can extract them at their native size, but there's no more resolution to be had.

You can use a tool like:
http://www.somepdf.com/some-pdf-image-extract.html

to do this.

You weren't wrong -- there are times when setting a higher resolution on a PDF to JPG conversion will give you better resolution, like when they've embedded text-- in that case, the conversion software will rip the text to the resolution you've set.

But the software really can't do anything with a JPG -- unlike with postscript or truetype fonts, there's no way to compute more pixels.