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Good Scanning Starts Here (3) Scanning photos from Magazines and other sources. Before I delve into the unique way photos are printed in magazines, I must remind you about copyright issues. Put simply, a photographer earns his daily bread by selling the right to reproduce or publish the results of his labours. If, therefore, you make a copy of a picture to which you have no "rights" (ie, you haven’t paid to use it) you are then, technically, in breach of the law. How does this affect you? Well, suppose a magazine publishes a picture that you rather like, and you discover that it’s a reproduction of the photographer’s famous chocolate box top. You scan it, correct it, and print it out on your A3 full colour, photo-quality printer, frame it and hang it on your wall. You have broken the law – the photographer himself may not even hold the rights to the photograph – the chocolate company may well have purchased the rights from him in perpetuity. Now, the fact is, if you’ve only scanned the picture for your own use, and never give a copy away or sell it, then you’re unlikely to be prosecuted – generally speaking, you’re allowed to make a single copy for your own use. As soon as you part with it, though, you’re on dodgy ground. There, that’s the legal stuff over with. Continuous and dots So what makes a magazine printed photograph so different from the one you took in Ibiza? In truth, it’s down to only one thing – and that’s how it is printed. Your photo of Aunty Nellie up to her armpits in Latin Lovers is printed in what’s known as continuous tone – that is, there are no limits to where a given colour is, or how big it is, or what colour it is. In a magazine, however, the photographs that are printed are reproduced by a system of dots of four or six process colours. If you get out your loupe (magnifying glass) and have a gander, you’ll see that it looks just like a fairly coarse Ink-Jet printed photo. When you scan such a print, you will actually be scanning the individual dots – most scanners can handle resolutions far finer than magazine photograph printing. If you simply print what you’ve scanned at the same size, then you’ll get pretty much the same quality of output. If, however, you enlarge the print, then you’ll get bigger and bigger dots – check out the size of the dots on billboard photographs – they’re like saucers! So, what you need to do in your image manipulation software is to get rid of the dots. That sounds simple enough, until you realise that you can’t actually get rid of the dots at all, because that’s exactly how any scanned image is recorded. What you can do, though, is to apply a filter that changes the arrangement of the dots so that the pattern is not quite so regular. In most bitmap editors, the filter has a title very much like De-Screening or De-Speckle. Simply run the filter over the whole image once you’ve scanned it, and the image should look a lot more like a scan from one of your own photos. Resolutions It’s also worth doing some work before you commit to the final scan. Try to estimate the resolution that the photo has been printed at, and choose a scanning resolution that doesn’t produce a moiré effect - if the magazine prints at 2400dpi lined at 150dpi, try to use a factor of 2400 as your scan resolution – 300dpi, for instance. That way, there’s less chance of the scan head reading non-existent lines on the photo. In all other respects, scanning from a magazine print is much the same as scanning photos – the same techniques for the different types of paper apply just as well to this field as they do to "real" photos. Enjoy – but don’t break copyright restrictions!! Part two - Scanning Photographs
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