This fine book covers many aspects of computer graphic work. As the title implies, it begins with a discussion of scanners and how to use them, and moves on to step-by-step instructions on how to manipulate digital images.
January 8, 1997
Now of course anyone can slap a photo on a flatbed scanner, crop and resize it in Photoshop, add some text in Pagemaker or Corel, and print 'er out. But there is much, much more that you can do to improve the quality of an image, or transform it into something completely different. The first step is to understand how your scanner works, and adjust the parameters to optimize the scan for your particular image. What resolution should you scan at? If you plan to convert a color photo to black-and-white, should you scan it in black-and-white, or should you scan in color and convert it later? Which file format is best for your purposes? This book should answer these questions for you.
Once you get your photo, drawing or whatever, into the digital universe, there are several things you can do to make it look better. Scratches or other imperfections can be removed, and the exposure and color balance can be adjusted. It's a simple matter to adjust the brightness or contrast of an image, but Photoshop and other image-manipulation programs provide more sophisticated tools. By using the Levels, Curves, and Gamma tools in Photoshop, you can often get better results than by simply adjusting brightness and contrast. Hue, saturation and color balance can be tweaked to improve the work of the photographer, or to create special effects.
Of course, improving or retouching an image is only the beginning of what can be done with today's powerful digital tools. There are a couple of different ways to remove a background, or other unwanted elements. A variety of textures and artistic effects can be applied to make a photo look like a pencil drawing, an engraving, or whatever. By combining a scanned image with other art or text elements, you can create almost anything you can imagine. Start with a Scan covers all the possibilities pretty thoroughly. They talk about Photoshop a lot, but the techniques covered are perfectly applicable to other image-editing packages as well.
Some of the chapters of this book are: Working with Scanners; Editing Scanned Images; Working with Printed Clip Art; Applying Artists' Techniques; Creating Textures and Backgrounds; Transforming Photos into Graphics; Scanning Real Objects; Creating 3D Illustrations; and Multimedia Projects (including a section on designing graphics for the Web. Each topic is well-covered with lots of examples and imaginative suggestions.
As a book of this type should, Start with a Scan contains many illustrations, including plenty of side-by-side comparisons of differently edited images. My one complaint about the book is that some of these photos are rather small, making it difficult to see the subtle differences that they are meant to illustrate. All in all, though, I found Start with a Scan to be a very informative and well-written book, and I highly recommend it.
