3 replies to this topic

[Noble Kale]

I was recently prowling through the rarity guide and noticed that you don't have a box scan for the HES release of Starmaster.
I have scanned mine and placed it here:
http://opax.swin.edu...aster-Cover.jpg
It's one of the HES releases that doesn't come in a box, but more of a video cassete plastic book like thing (yes, that's a technical term ), so what's there is a scan of the 'sleeve' of the box.

I was wondering how big you prefer to have your box scans? I can probably do that one much bigger (and better quality) if necessary...

[Albert]

Generally I scan everything at 200dpi or better (recently I've started scanning everything at 300, and scan magazines at 450dpi). For normal "boxes", we reduce the individual images (front/back) to a width of 600 pixels. However, these HES sleeve are rather weird. I'll probably just hack up the single image into "front" and "back" images. We already have a few HES box scans, one is of a normal paper box, one is a scan with the sleeve in the plastic box, and another appears to be a scan of the sleeve itself.

The short of it is, if you can scan the image at 200dpi I'd be happy.

Thanks!

..Al

[Noble Kale]

Ok then.
I think I can manage that. If you have any more advice about how you would like things scanned, I'd be happy to listen.

[Albert]

Noble Kale said:

Ok then.
I think I can manage that. If you have any more advice about how you would like things scanned, I'd be happy to listen.

Okay, here's some advice. Depending on the type of material I scan, I generally scan at a significantly higher resolution than I intend to use. For instance, the box scans on AtariAge start out at 200 or 300dpi, but get reduced considerably. This helps reduce the "screen" effect that is often visible on scanned material. My scanner has a "descreening" feature, but it takes much longer to scan this way, when I'm just going to shrink the image anyway. Plus it's then "modifying" the original, which I'd rather not have it do.

If you're scanning anything light (which is most material, such as manual pages), it helps if you put a piece of black paper behind the item. This will cut down or eliminate any "bleed through" of printing from the other side of the page. Since this bleed through can be very difficult to get rid of after the fact, this is a very useful tip.

Most scanners do not scan all the way to the edge of the scanner glass. With some material I don't really care about this, but with others I want to make sure I get the edges of the items I am scanning. An Epson 1640U (I think that's the model) scanner I have is notorious about this, I think it eats a good 1/8" from the edges. This aggravated me to no end, so I eventually bought an HP 7400c, which is much better in this regard. Still, I will sometimes place an item away from the edges. The main disadvantage in doing this is you may need to manually rotate images since they won't be aligned with the horizontal and/or vertical edge of the glass. Some people place a thin layer of material (say, a thin slice of balsa wood) along the edges of the scanner glass, which they then can use as a new edge to push things against. I have not tried this yet.

I usually play around with the exposure settings for scans, rather than using the default values provided by the HP scanner drivers. Once I have the settings the way I want for the material I'm going to scan, I write down the values so if anything happens to the settings partway through the scanning (computer locks up, I accidently hit a key resetting them to the defaults, etc.) I can set them back to the correct values. This ensures that the scans in any given "batch" are consistent with one another.

I think that's it for now. I've been wanting to create a page illustrating tips such as the above, but just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Hope these help,

..Al