Although the specifics of getting the best results from your scanner
vary depending on what hardware you're using, there are a few general tips
that can help you out. Let's explore these tips, shall we?
Most scanning software lets you select the mode. Adjust the mode
depending on what type of image you're scanning. The most typical modes are
line art, halftone, grayscale, and color.
Line art is for things that contain solid areas of black and white. You
use this mode if you are scanning a black-and-white logo off your
letterhead or a pen-and-ink drawing. The key to this mode is that it
doesn't read any shades of gray.
Halftones are pictures from books, newspapers, and magazines. When
pictures are printed in newspapers, the continuous tones of the photographs
need to be converted into tiny black dots of varying sizes. Pictures in
books and magazines are made up of dots too, only a lot smaller. In the
case of color pictures, the dots are yellow, black, magenta, or cyan, all
layered on top of each other to form the picture. Anyway, the halftone
setting is for
scanning these kinds of pictures.
To scan actual color or black-and-white photos, use the color and
grayscale modes.
After choosing a mode, load your object to be scanned into the scanner
face down on the glass, just like on a photocopy machine, and hit Prescan.
The scanner will take a quick pass of the image and display a rough version
on your screen. This gives you an idea of what the final product will look
like, but more important, it lets you specify which section of the image
you want to scan. Getting a high-quality scan can sometimes take forever,
so don't waste your time scanning the whole thing if you just want a piece
of it. Scanning the whole thing takes up a lot of computer memory; it's a
waste if you're going to crop the photo later on, anyway. So use a
selection tool to choose the area you want to scan.
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