Whereas most people buy a flatbed scanner for photos, negatives, or transparencies, you can scan all kinds of thick materials and even three-dimensional objects.

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Textures and native Guatemalan textiles are my favorite.
If you do any kind of graphics design, a good quality flatbed scanner and professional scanning software will open up the world of three-dimensional scanning.

gautemalan coctail napkin
Here is a Guatemalan cocktail napkin, hand-woven by the Quiche Maya. You can enlarge this scan and make all kinds of beautiful decorations.

Scanned using LinoColor software imported via Photoshop. I find this much quicker than twiddling around with other means of calling up a scanned image. The Linotype-Hell scanner, scanner software, and LinoColor color correction software allowed me to scan however I wanted to, using primarily Photoshop or learning Linocolor's sophisticated options.

I once hired a scanner operator who came with all kinds of recommendations. Six months later we found out that the scans were all repaired in Adobe Photoshop. The actual original scans were a disaster. The raw scans were so bad that I ended up throwing them all away.

This operator was slick enough with basic Photoshop that she could hide the poorly balanced originals. This was several years ago when I depended on technicians and operators to do all this. Now that I do the testing myself, I have learned why it is important to have a good scan to start with. Photoshop is not a scanning software, but a repair software. How nice if your original scans are so good they don't need repairing?

 

Linocolor 30 minutes cover

It is much more cost effective to start off with good scanning software. No matter how steep the learning curve, the time spend learning the new software is repaid a thousand times over during use of the scanner.

The hourly wage you pay yourself, or your operator, will end up costing ten times more than your scanner. If you attempt to get by with a cheap scanner and/or inadequate software, you will have to pay your operator to clean up all the mangled color. If you get a Linotype-Hell scanner, it automatically comes with LinoColor scanner software. Actually you can now do everything in the scanner Software, and skip Photoshop all together.

Gateway to flatbed scanner | gateway to LinoColor software | scan of rope jaguar

Once you get all your nice new scanned images, where and how can you store them? We faced this same dilemma and have worked out a variety of solutions: burning your own CD-R, using the new DVD-RAM., or developing a RAID system for your studio (it's easy, we have a 36 GB RAID system in our own office)

 

 

 

 RAID is super fast. Let MegaHaus tell you how.
 raid system
A RAID system is as easy as hooking two drives together. You get twice the speed of a single drive with RAID level 0.
 How should you store your scanned images?
 dvd ram
DVD-RAM stores 5.2 GB on a disk that costs under $60 (2.6 GB per side).
A DVD-RAM burner/player costs under $800. How, where to buy?

FLAAR Digital Imaging Technology Center

index and directory of all internal links for cameras and scanners

lots of links to information on desktop publishing hardware/software, www.laser-printer-reviews.org

home page, www.cameras-scanners-flaar

www.digital-photography.org

 
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Posted May 25, 1999, last updated May 26, 1999: links added Mar. 2002, Redesigned January 2004
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