I use a Fujitsu 600c to scan everything, using software that I wrote just
for archiving old manuals. I used the ImageBasic toolkit from Diamond Head
Software (purchased by my company for other purposes ;) ) that came
packaged complete with all kinds of neat utilities like de-speckle,
skew-fix, etc. It's nice to use because I set a few pre-set scanning modes
that set up the scanner for what I'm doing; noisy b/w, noisy colour,
text-only, detailed-graphics, etc.
Some suggestions:
1) Try scanning text or any B/W pages in B/W mode. Since the bits can only
be white/black, it can automatically get rid of a lot of background noise.
2) I think the loss of detail on the schematics may be due to the
resolution of your scanner, as well as noise showing up because of the
greyscale setting. Try them B/W and just adjust the contrast/brightness
until you lose the noise. The nice thing about Photoshop is being able to
edit sections of the page at a time, so you could clean up each little
section as you go.
3) Depending on what kind of printer you have, you might try playing with
the half-tone/dithering settings as well.
Most of my images of 8.5x11 are 50k-250k for B/W, 500k-1.5M for 16-shade,
and anywhere from 5-15 megs for colour (all at 600dpi). I usually print
them on an HP Laserjet 4si at 600dpi or an Apple LW16-600 with photo-grade
enabled.
Aaron
On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Doug Coward wrote:
> I would like hear from anyone that has done any archiving of their
> classic computer documents and manuals.
>
> I'm currently using a UMAX 300P that claims a maximum 24 bit color
> resolution of 300x600 dpi. I'm scanning into Photoshop4 and saving
> in JPEG format. I'm trying to save as much information as I can, so
> pages that have any color besides black and white, I'm scanning
> at 299 (that's the max for color) dpi in RGB and and everything else in
> 299 dpi grayscale. I'm averaging, for 8.5 x 11 pages, about 5.3 Mb
> for color and 2.1 Mb for grayscale. Just last weekend I burned
> my first CD of docs consisting of 26 color pages and 170 B/W
> pages for a total of 454 Mb.( I didn't fill the CD bcause I was anxious
> to try printing the files at work.)
> I printed two of the highest detailed B/W pages (schematics) today
> at 400 dpi. The results were disappointing. All of the fine details were
> lost. I assume I need to use a higher resolution for printing. I also have
> quite a bit of background clutter on the printed page. I'm having no
> problems seeing the smallest details when I magnify the pages in
> Photoshop.
>
>
>
>
>
> =========================================
> Doug Coward dcoward_at_pressstart.com
> Senior Software Engineer
> Press Start Inc.
> Sunnyvale,CA
>
> Curator
> Museum of Personal Computing Machinery
> http://www.best.com/~dcoward/museum
> =========================================
>
Received on Tue Mar 31 1998 - 03:29:53 BST