]3ob <bob [ @ ] onemanband.com> writes:
On 2009-05-01 20:57:21 -0400, Alex Lee <alelee@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.