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Colour or greyscale scanning is largely done via CCD-type scanners. If you can imagine yourself using a digital camera, then you can understand how scanners work. Light, a flat path, and a mechanism for converting light data into binary numbers is all about scanning. So sophisticated is this technology, one has to marvel at how software can do so much. In our case, our wide-format scanner uses four digital cameras each seeing a small part of a big original. A step motor drives the original across a flat lit up path and the rest is taken care of by software. Each strip of information is stitched together and each cameras data is stitched and aligned so that what we see on a computer screen is a replica of the original. Getting a good colour scan requires knowledge of white, grey and black. These three light intensities are important steps to getting colour right. If you haven’t noticed yet a good scanner will always scan very dark and needs correction usually done via presets in the software. These presets are based on average assumptions about the type of original being scanned. Have you ever noticed you need to tell the scanner you are scanning a photo, or text or printed material? We at Brisbane Colour Bureau have developed a stringent workflow to ensure we optimize colour fidelity of our scans. Our first step is calibrating the scanner-it must be behaving in a known predictable manner. Once we have our reference point established we do a scan at a pre-defined gamma (brightness). The scan is completed and colours are controlled by the scanner. Our next step is using our favourite and world famous tool-Adobe Photoshop--to check our scan. We check any part of the image which is or should be white, black and grey (neutral). These three boundaries when corrected usually bring life and vibrancy to the scanned image. To make matters more complex, there are several definitions of what is white and black but only one definition of grey. There is a caveat to any scan: not all colours are correct. In fact this in only true because the print shows us this. Yet when we see our image on the screen, we find that the colours can look great, so why aren’t they printing correctly. The simple answer is the following:
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Ground Floor 360 Queen Street Brisbane Qld Ph (07) 3229 6044 |
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