Ooh, I got the Waterhouse-Hayward technique working with the flatbed scanner; it’s wonderful! Check out what happens when a dead mollusk collaborates with several years of intense surf. [Series intro here.]
Obviously, two sides of the same shell. The first shows a flat face so it’s just lying on the scanner. It wouldn’t lie flat for the second so I had to suspend one end with thread, and indeed when one end’s grounded the other eventually stops oscillating.
Um, I suppose I should record the equipment; it’s a CanoScan 3000F plugged via USB into a white-box running Windows XP and the CanoScan Toolbox software. There’s still room for improvement. I haven’t figured out how to tell the scanner to just scan the corner where the shell is, which means I’m scanning at only 300DPI; the scanner can go way higher, but when you scan the whole 8½x11" area at more than 300DPI, it complains about digital artifacts larger than 100MB. This is good enough for the screen, but if I want to print I’ll need a few hundred more DPI.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: dr2chase (Mar 16 2007, at 06:19)
Get a Mac (you've got a Mac, don't you?), get Vuescan.
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From: John Cowan (Mar 16 2007, at 07:13)
Wow. It's huge how much difference it makes to have that depth of field. Your other shell pix looked like chunks of bone by comparison.
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From: G Gollings (Mar 16 2007, at 10:13)
I would expect you could just click-n-drag in the scan preview window to define a crop---perhaps it isn't that simple, I'm not sure. The 'Specify the Scan Area' part of this Canon publication may be helpful:
http://download.canon.com.au/manuals/basic_scanning.pdf
When scaling through scanning-at-higher-resolutions, it is possibly beneficial to jump to the scanner's 'native' resolutions, rather than picking an arbitrary 735dpi, or whatever. I think the rationale was to avoid software interpolation, so this might imply you need to fix the scanner scaling setting at 100%, 1200dpi (initial width and height being set by the crop you draw). There is also a distinct possibility that I am making this up, memory is fickle ;-P
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From: Brian Utterback (Mar 19 2007, at 10:53)
So, how did you get it to work?
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