Re: Apple II Magazines

[PZ <skierpaul@yahoo.com>]

On May 3, 2:24 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
> Jerry wrote:
> > ]3ob <bob [ @ ] onemanband.com> writes:
>
> >> On 2009-05-01 20:57:21 -0400, Alex Lee <ale...@mac.com> said:
> >> I'd love to hear any tips/suggestions you have. My scanner can do some
> >> pretty high-quality scans, but I'm always open to new techniques. Any
> >> suggestions for getting around the spine curl (without destroying the
> >> issue)?
>
> > If you use a cradle and lay the magazine on it:
>
> >    ...                   ...
> >       ...             ...
> >          ...       ...         side view
> >             ... ...            magazine spine in the center
>
> > and then lay glass over top of the pages, you can then use a digital
> > camera on a tripod to take good images of the pages.
>
> > You do need to make sure the camera is far enough away from the pages
> > to reduce the non-linear warping of the page rectangle, and you need
> > to have strong light (preferably white light) directly above the
> > spine.  You want the position of the camera and the lights such that
> > there is no reflection of the light off the glass and into the lens of
> > the camera.  Furthermore, you want the area behind the camera to be
> > flat black (black cloth works) so there are no spurious images
> > reflected onto the glass and into your image.
>
> > I set up my camera in custom mode, so that the white-balance, focal
> > length, aperture, etc are all consistent from page to page.
>
> > I'm (slowly) working on building a jig like this where I can move the
> > glass up and down easier, but from my experience thus far, I can
> > "scan" a book much, much faster using a camera than with a scanner.  I
> > think it's somewhere around 7-10 seconds per page.  There are newer
> > scanners that are much faster so maybe that is less of an issue.  If I
> > had a working jig, I would also have much greater control over the
> > position of the page within the camera shot, so it would be easier to
> > crop away the non-page parts of the image.
>
> > I use some free software tools to post-process the images (adjust
> > background to pure white, improve contrast, deskew) and turn them into
> > PDF.  ImageMagick is quite useful.
>
> The one thing I would add is that if a sheet of flat black paper is
> inserted behind the "top" page on each side, there will be essentially
> no "bleedthrough" of the reverse of the page into the page images.
>
> -michael
>
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>
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>
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Here's how Google does it:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/02/it-turns-out-that-google-even-has-a-competitive-advantage-in-scanning-books/