Those of you with flatbed scanners may like to know of a useful
article in Macworld February 2001 – “3-D-object scanning planning” by
Janet Ashford. Shows the setup for scanning direct from the bed of the
scanner, including jewellery examples
I’ve been directly scanning most of my items for about a year now and
for the most part have been happy (if not always with the
reproduction, at least with the TREMENDOUS amount of time saved). At
least with the scanner I have, I haven’t been able to capture darker
stones (especially opaque ones) accurately and I haven’t successfully
found a way around this. Earrings and domed items are also something
of a challenge to which I haven’t found a good solution. I’ll have to
check out the article - thanks for the heads-up!
Carrie
well, it’s good to know i’m not the only one scanning in pieces! 
my wife wove a tunic for me…it’s colour is natural cotton…i
drape this over top of the pieces i am scannning to better define the
pieces and their colours. as for earrings, i simply hook them into
the tunic, then drape the tunic onto the scanner very
carefully…takes a bit of time and patience. from what i understand,
picture files on a cd are all that are needed to
make slides…erhard.
I remove the lid and add extra light when I scan jewellery on the
flatbed, Many of my site images were ‘direct scans’. I drop a piece of
white tissue over the jewellery for a nice crinkled backdrop. Best
also with a polystyrene or similar white box around the objects. The
quality of the light I add has a great bearing on the colouring of the
scan, and that was a real drag (everything came out slightly pink). So
I have a daylight flourescent in the equapoise providing light from
above; it gives better colouring, but still probably not as good as if
I were to spend money on proper photographic lighting.
Brian
Brian: I also try to scan most of my jewelry but the pink highlights
are almost impossible to get rid of. If the piece has no stones, I
sometimes scan it in black and white. But I wonder if anyone has any
tips about correcting the pink coloring? Sandra
tips about correcting the pink coloring
Sandra, I scan all of my work and then save the scan to disk, next I
open the scan in my digital camera program and do corrections for
balance, hue, saturation and sharpness and save to disk again. No
pink.
Donna in VA
Brian: I also try to scan most of my jewelry but the pink highlights are almost impossible to get rid of. I wonder if anyone has any tips about correcting the pink coloring? Sandra
Ideally, what you really need is what a photograher would call a
color correction filter, to correct the color of the light in the
scanner. But since the scanner light probably does not have a
continuous spectrum, getting the proper filter would probably be very
complicated and expensive. I would suggest that you look for some
sheets of very lightly colored cellophane – (or something
transparent) --in the blue-green range, and do a little experimenting
see if you can find something that will make it look better. Just put
the cellophane between the piece and the platen.
margaret
Sandra
If you are scanning to a reasonably good graphic programme you should
be able to get rid of the pink or any other colour cast for that
matter…
I find photoshop 5 fine is this respect and I am sure there are other
graphic programmes around that are equally good and probably cheaper.
Regards Keith Torckler, Cornwallis, New Zealand
I can’t afford Photoshop and it’s probably more than I need if I
could. MicroGrafx Picture Publisher works well and is reasonably
priced. www.micrografx.com
Christine in Littleton Mass US where it’s foggy and snowy and the cat’s
sleeping through it.
Hi, I am delurking to add my inflation-adjusted 3 cents and say that
Jasc Paintshop Pro also is very powerful program at a lot less than
Photoshop, and giving a wide range of tools to fix or manipulate
scanned or digital images. Try $120 or so with a full featured trial
lasting 60 days before dying. http://www.Jasc.com shareware grown up
just a satisfied customer, no affiliation
Bill Phillips Silver by Bill
How do you get rid of the pink and purple cast using the photoshop
commands thanks
Walter and Michele Cooling
Hi, everyone!
On the subject of digital imaging I recently came across a book
called “Digital Photography! I didn’t know you could do that” by
Erica Sadun. It costs $19.99, contains a full version of Adobe
PhotoDeluxe and a lot of good info for the money. I think it’s a
great value and the software by itself prices up to $50.00.
Best regards,
Vera Battemarco
All
After reading all the I could find on Orchid about
digital cameras and flatbed scanning, I FINALLY bit the bullet and
bought a flatbed scanner. Not that I do not want a digital camera,
just that that expensive item will have to come later. (The scanner
was only $126USD including tax) When I say “all the I
could find” I mean literally that, and there is a ton of good info in
the Orchid archives. I encourage everyone to check the archives often
on any subject…its all there!
I have used a sheet fed scanner for the past 7 years, an old Logitec,
which I dearly loved for its small footprint if nothing else. But all
this info about scanning products got the best of me so off I went to
the local computer show. I ended up with a Plustek UT12, a 48 bit
1200dpi machine. It has a Micrografx photo processor which seems
to be
about as powerful as my Adobe but as it is bundled directly to the
scanner is easier to use. I have not yet compared the two but will
report any significant findings later.
Suffice to say, I don’t know why I waited so long. I do commissions
for people all over the country and now I can work with them on line
to get and give the best product possible. What a truly neat thing to
have.
A special thanks to all you Orchidians out there who have taken the
time to provide your pet procedures which I will try over the coming
months. Without you people I probably would never have done it.
Thanks to all.
Cheers, Don at The Charles Belle Studio in SOFL where simple elegance
IS fine jewerly!
How do you get rid of the pink and purple cast using the PhotoShop commands thanks
There are several tools that will help adjust color in PhotoShop.
There are several good available tutorials at the Adobe web-site.
The tools you will want to use are in the “Image” section. Then go to
“Adjust”. Here you will see several tools that you can use to adjust
your images.
“Hue/Saturation” “Levels” “Curves” “Color Balance” “Brightness/Contrast”
As a side note to this. I have been adding more pictures to my site.
The other day my site was at just over 5 megs. I only have 6 megs of
space included with earthlink service. I can buy more if I want, but I
would rather not at this time. Anyway, I applied some jpeg compression
to all of the images on my site using Adobe Imageready. I was able to
get the site down to 2.96 megs without losing too much detail. My
larger images were over 50k now they are about 25 to 30k.
Timothy A. Hansen
TAH Handcrafted Jewelry
web-site: www.home.earthlink.net/~tahhandcraft
e-mail: @Timothy_A_Hansen
“Over-use” of excellent software tools is one thing that I’m noticing
as more people put pictures on the web. If you use a camera or a
scanner, enhancing with software does not take the place of a quality
original. I’ve just had to plunge into a Nikon 990 after wasting money
and lots (&lots) of time going with a mid price Kodak (210plus). It
was a very good camera but not for close-up. My scanner does some
items quite well but, not a majority. I tried to make my original
camera pictures better by cleaning up with software. Minor clean-up
works ok but more is NOT better. With all of my camera pictures and
most scanned items it just made them look more and more like drawings
or ‘manufactured’ images. As you look at different sites (and your
own) you can tell the pictures that are high quality to begin with.
Those are the ones that show the quality in your jewelry and stones.
I have 10 years (or so) with computer graphics and can do some pretty
slick trick but, nothing is better than a high quality original. Good
luck…my site will be up in a month (or so) and we’ll see if I can
practice what I preach (with the 990).
Regis