raveflyers.co.uk message board | FAQ
Posted by Weed (82.34.16.162) on 23:19:23 14/July/04
In Reply to: Re: How do I make a picture gallery of my flyers? posted by phatdave
: ...I do 2 scans of A3 flyers, one for each half and then join them and crop etc in photoshop.
i'm a bit hesitant to go on cos there's people reading this who know 100 times more than i do about it - but remembering the struggle i had to understand very simple things when i started scanning stuff in, it might help... and also i guess i just like talking :)
so, following on from Dave's post, here's more details of the basic procedure i use in Photoshop - i crop the scanned pics so that there is a slight overlap on the section where they join (cos the original edges of the scanned pic can be a bit rough - but i don't bother to accurately crop the other sides yet), adjust the contrast and brightness if necessary (and sometimes the colours - Image-Adjust-Auto Levels occasionally works wonders) so that the joining sections are as closely alike as i can get them, create a new (empty) pic slightly larger than the combined size of the 2 pics, copy and paste the scans onto the new pic (using standard Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C), move them into position, flatten the layers, crop accurately to the edges of the flyer, then use the rubber stamp tool (= the clone tool) to blur over any disparities in the join
for shaped flyers, i sometimes create a new pic the same size as the scan with the background set to transparent, copy and paste the scan to the new pic, use the magic wand tool to select the unneeded background, cut it away, and save as a gif without flattening the layers - (there's various techniques i'm still learning about which are sometimes needed to make the curved edges look smooth in the final pic)
while doing this this i'm constantly changing the magnification level, from whole pic down to individual pixel level, and also resetting the parameters of the tools as necessary (especially brush size of the rubber stamp, & tolerance of the magic wand)
however this is all based on a trial and error approach to photoshop, and my final result is pretty crude - i'm sure there's other tools i could/should be using - a few hours spent studying would repay itself immediately
: To shrink the flyer picture size to view on the web photoshop is ideal.
yes, in photoshop just right click on top of pic window and select Image Size
TIP - if the flyer has a white border, i make sure photoshop background/foreground settings are at default black and white, right click on top of pic window, select Canvas Size, increase the width and height by 2 pixels each, and this creates a one pixel wide black border to define the edge of the flyer so it looks ok when viewed in browser windows (or on web pages) with white background
: You basically want them at 72 dpi
: ...and saved them better qulity like the scans Weed has on his price guide.
but still not satisfactory - i keep changing my mind on this - many of the pics in the price guide that have come from my own scans i've dimensioned so that an A4 landscape flyer fits on an 800*600 screen without any need to scroll horizontally - to get this i scan in at 64dpi - which is quite low resolution - but it also helps keeps the filesize down (tho that's a whole subject in itself, which i know practically nothing about)
72 dpi is still a standard resolution used - using a 15" monitor with the screen resolution set to 800x600, the resultant screen image is approx the same size as the original pic - but i find that this is often too low to read small text
so for the full size pics in the gallery of older flyers at hyperreal, i now scan in front and backs at 96dpi
but i still haven't settled on what size thumbnails to use (the scaled down pics which appear on the web pages that are clicked on to get the full size images) - i still get a bit anxious if the combined size of web page + pics is much greater than 100K, cos that's quite a lot for someone using dialup access - so the size of the small pics really depends on how many pics you're having on a page, and how long you want it to take to download them
(PS in an ideal world, i'd be scanning in at the highest res possible, saving the scans as my masters, and then using copies of them to work from whenever i wanted to create the much smaller resolution images needed for web pages - in practice most people don't have the memory to store such large files, and it needs powerful computers to manipulate them - however the principle remains - scan in high res and scale down)
for scaling pics, there's various options to do with resampling - but again, that's something i'm still finding out about
TIP - for adjusting perspective pics taken with a digital camera, if the flyer has been taken against a background, the image can be restored to it's correct shape and then cropped - adjust the size of the pic so it fits in its photoshop window with something to spare, select the whole image (Ctrl-A), and choose the menu option Edit-Transform-Distort - now it's possible to pull in and out any of the corners of the pic to reshape its contents
PS my speciality is not creating the pics, but indexing them so that they're easy to find :)