NVMUG eNews 8/25/2001v

NVMUG Meeting
10 A.M. - 12 Noon
Saturday, August 25, 2001
Community Bank Building, St. Johnsbury

Warren Walker explained scanning with a demonstration on his UMAX VistaScan scanner. (See the following meeting notes.) Visitors included a new IBook duo and a G4 Powerbook.

In this NVMUG eNews

1. Meeting Notes: Warren Walker Presents Scanning

Warren brought beautiful flower pictures printed with his new Epson 1280 printer. The printer lists for $500 but he found it on sale for $420 plus $25 shipping. It has a maximum resolution, using special paper, of 2880 x 720 DPI. It can print on paper up to 13 x 19 inches. It can also use paper rolls up to 13 inches wide by 32.8 feet. It is a six color printer, using light cyan and light magenta to produce smoother color gradients. On special paper, the prints should be as durable as photographs. They should last 25 years if protected behind glass and kept out of the sun. He would not sell prints which would not last.

On his monitor he displayed a moth on a flower. The macro picture almost filled the screen.

I got out my new iBook to see if it would work to do the minutes. My handwriting is getting so bad that it is difficult for me to read my notes.

Phyllis asked Warren how you download something before Warren began his presentation. Warren gave her careful directions. Phyllis said it sounded like it might be too much bother. At the same time Geof was describing the problems he was having with a scanner. And, Richard was commenting.

Warren explained that scanners use a row of sensors that scan across the image. The scanner has to put the image into some type of software. Warren has a bit of VistaScan software called a PlugIn added to his PhotoShop program. Warren acquires images using this PlugIn in PhotoShop to scan them with his UMAX scanner.

Warren placed a picture of berries on his scanner, and started his software which displayed a preview image on his monitor. Warren then used his mouse to drag a selection line around the image he wanted to scan, excluding a lot of blank space. This makes a better composition and reduced the amount of memory required.

Most scanners come with some basic image editing software, but Warren reads his images into PhotoShop. We hope to cover more about editing images once they are in the computer in a later program or programs.

There are also a number of adjustments you can do to get a better, or more appropriate image, when you scan it into the computer. If you set up custom images adjustments for screening in, you can save the settings and reload them in the future. The adjustments you set depend upon the image you are scanning, and the use you intend to make of it once it is in the computer. (Warren creates images for sale. Midge knows where he can get it framed.)

Normal default for color is RGB. The CMYK setting for color is for output to printers, but computer printers use RGB and convert it to CMYK, so there is no reason for most people to scan in with CMYK. If you needed CMYK you would probably need a costly professional scanner. Halftone is what magazine printing might use to create mixed colors. It is of no particular value to Warren.

You can scan with gray, 256 levels, for scanning in black and white pictures, or a mixture of black and white pictures and text. Line Art scans in black and white, no gray. It uses less memory when all you are scanning is text, and it is essential for character recognition.

A media setting permits reflective scans, such as of prints, or transmissive scans, such as transparencies. For slides you need an attachment and a higher resolution than most scanners provide. There are dedicated scanners that do a much better job with slides. Scanners can also scan a negative and automatically invert the color image. Warren demonstrated the problem you would have in scanning a one and one third inch slide with a 300 dpi scanner by enlarging part of an image to show its pixels.

The maximum optical resolution on Warren's scanner is 300 dpi. His scanner is about 4 years old. Modern scanners have optical resolutions of 600 to 1200 dpi and cost less.

Some scanners get a higher resolution by interpolating between the optical dots.PhotoShop can do the same thing better.

For Ink Jet printing, the recommendation is to scan at half the resolution that the printer is capable of printing. Printer will used 4 dots of color to print one pixel. At a one for one match between the scanning and printing resolution, the printer can only use one of the four dots to print it.

VistaScan can scale the image to make it larger or smaller. Warren could scan 300 dpi image with 200% scale, but it would greatly increase the memory used, and the scanner would have to interpolate because it cannot scan more than 300 optical dots per inch.

Color adjustment options (MagicMatch) allows you to select an output device and match the color scan to fit. The alternate good choice is Auto Adjust, which adjusts the reading scanning. For many users Auto Adjust is the only adjustment they need to use. (Phyllis said she uses the other adjustments to see their effect, but usually goes back to auto adjust for her scan.)

There are several adjustments you can do with VistaScan, and alternate ways you can do them.

You can use eye droppers to pick the lightest and darkest points to change the pixels to black and white, and all the other pixels will be graded between the two end scales. Or you can use the sliders for black, white, brightness, and contrast. It may be best just to use auto adjust, and then adjust the result using PhotoShop or similar. The input adjustments are not a substitute for a good Photo Editing program.

Image menu gives you a few more adjustment options. Invert, highlight and shadow for each of the three different colors with sliders to give you greater control, but again your photo editing program may do it better. With the curve control you can selectively modify portions of the image by pulling a straight line on a graph into to a curved shape. Warren said he has really never gotten good with curves. For that you really have to know how to use color. Gamma sets the brightness of the screen which may be more important for a PC computer.

PC monitors are usually darker than Mac monitors. This is left over from early hardware limits. They can be recalibrated to match Mac monitors but most users leave them at the factory settings. Mac monitors can be set to match PC's (but why?). Really, people who are creating Web pages sometimes recalibrate their monitors so they can preview their work as most viewers will see it. The gamma settings in the scanner can be useful if you know the scan will be viewed by PC users on the Internet or via email.

Descreening is only used to get rid of some extra stuff in halftones. Technically, descreening helps prevent moire patterns created by interference between the halftone dots and scanner dots (pixels).

Sharpen or blur image works if you do not have a photo editing program for it.

If you are going to send the image over the internet, you would need some program to convert the scan ot jpg (if your scanner doesn't), but you do not need anything more that the scanner cannot do. PhotoShop would not be of any benefit.

To e-mail an image you save it as jpg. Then you can drag it into your e-mail program attachment area or click attachments in your e-mail program and use the browser to get the image.

Geof Likes ColorIt which is an image editor and only costs like $29.95. PhotoShop is overkill for most people. PhotoShop L. E. is like PhotoShop with the high end stuff left out.

The high end stuff is the ability to create color separations for commercial printing. The latest version of PhotoShop LE appears to be based on PhotoShop 5.

Then Warren scanned the image into PhotoShop. The preview image is 72 dpi, but the scanned image is 300 dpi, so it looks better when enlarged in PhotoShop.

Next Warren demonstrated scanning a 3-D object. He put a piece of clear plastic on the scanner to protect the glass. Then he set his automobile keys on the plastic. From From his Photoshop plugin choices, including TWAIN, VistaScan, and VistaScan Auto, he chose VistaScan auto and obtained a good image of his car keys with very little effort.

Presto PageManager, which also came with the UMAX scanner, can scan directly to a printer or fax, or can scan text into an optical character recognition program. (Most other scanners also come with optical character recognition programs.) This is the only reasonable way to change scanned in text. OCR is software that tries to figure out what the letters on the screen are. It has to be black and white line art.

Selected text did not look very good on the screen. It was more readable when put it into ClarisWorks. Then you can use the spell checker and correct more of it. Some remaining errors will have to be correct manually. For letter size documents, Warren finds character recognition faster than keying it.

Geof says that it requires a lot of work when you use OCR for a spreadsheet because it does not interpret the tabs the way you would want it to. You have to put a lot of tabs in by hand.

The group applauded Warren's presentation.

I asked about database software for images that have been scanned in. Warren has a lot of images in iView, but is not sure if he likes it enough to register it yet.

Geof recommended DataViz MacLink, available at Datavis.com, for Phyllis1s problem in opening e-mail attachments. He said it has the best online registration that he has ever seen. He only had to type in his name for DataViz to find it. MacLink will open any e-mail enclosure that is not a program that requires another operating system to run.

Geof recommended a USB Zip drive for extra storage to meet her needs in response to a question from Phyllis.

Geof will demonstrate MacLink at the October meeting. Geof works with Windows 3.1, and Windows 2000. He just drags his files to convert them, and send the translated file to Office 95, Office 2000, or whatever, as an attachment to e-mail.

When Warren gets around to file-format demonstration program, he will explain how ones and zeros are made into something meaningful in different files.

Hartley Jackson took these notes on his iBook, proving to himself that it is reasonable for him to use an iBook for taking meeting minutes. He said he has not tried Mac OS X on it yet because he has too much to learn right now without OS X so he will wait for a newer version to come out.

Richard Flynn brought in his G4 Powerbook and set it next to the iBook so people could compare the two. He said that he has used Mac OS X, but there is not a lot of software yet, so it may make sense for me to stay with OS 9 for awhile.

Unfortunately the things Gail brought back for us from Mac Expo did not get to the meeting. Hopefully they will be here next month. There were several offers for a drawing to win one of both of the Macintosh laptops, but the owners did not agree.

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Bill Amos and Digital Photography

Bill and I corresponded about some AppleWorks questions, and I recommended version 6.2 as being the version he would want if he bought an iMac. He responded that Ver. 5 is fine. And

I have no intention of getting an iMac. I'm wedded to two big screens. I'm a firm believer in looking over the best of the discontinued crop, then making a selection. All this keeping up with the Joneses and getting the latest gizmo every six months isn't for me. Of course, when I hit a roadblock, that's another matter. So far so good. I'm adding a USB card to my 7500, so (a) I can run a Compact Flash memory card reader, rather than use my serial Nikon Coolpix camera for the same job, and (b) not have to worry about finding older serial printers and such when they are needed.

If you are at all interested in digital photography, go here and look through several years of the best images taken with a wide range of digicams:

http://www.steves-digicams.com/daily_dpotd.html

You might post this in the newsletter for others to explore. Lots of neat images that prove digital photography is here to stay!

Bill Amos

I checked the site, and liked what I found. You might want to check it too.

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5. Apple MUG Store

Have you surfed to

http://www.applemugstore.com/
lately?

And don't forget our own online source of new and refurbished computers and equipment, SmallDog at

http://www.smalldog.com

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6. Final Comments

I sold the Performa with the full set of equipment (everything but a printer) to Barry Hayes who wanted it for his daughter. I hope she will be happy with it. Thank you to the three other people who expressed an interest in buying it.

There is a possibility of a used Macintosh laptop in the not to distant future, definitely not mine!

One of our members who has not yet attended a meeting asked about classes for beginners. He bought a new iMac, but had several years of experience with a Performa. I would like to encourage all of you who are interested in learning more about using your Macintosh to come to our meetings for three reasons: First , you can learn a lot. Warren's talk at this last meeting was a good one for anyone who has a scanner, experienced or not. And there is always a chance to ask questions, and to learn from the questions others ask. Second, you make contacts with others who are eager to help you. Some may live close by and all are close by e-mail. And, third, we try present programs that are interesting to the people who attend the meetings. By attending, you can influence the program, and in turn the notes from the meeting may then help others like yourself.

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