Real World Scanning and Halftones: The Definitive Guide to Scanning and Halftones from the Desktop [Paperback]

David Blatner (Author), Steve Roth (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1566090938 | ISBN-13: 978-1566090933 | Publication Date: November 1993 | Edition: First Edition

Here's a book that will save you time and money as you master the digital halftone process, from scanning images to tweaking them on your Mac to image setting them. You'll learn about optical character recognition software, gamma control, sharpening, moires, PostScript halftones, Photo CD, and image-manipulating applications like Photoshop and PhotoStyler.Many people who are proficient on their PCs and Macs don't have a clue about scanners. Others have tried to use scanners, or incorporate scans into their documents, but with less-than-satisfactory results. Now there's a book that explains - in clear, simple language and with profuse illustration - what people need to know about scanners, and about the related subject of halftones as well. Written by desktop publishing gurus David Blatner and Stephen Roth, Real World Scanning and Halftones covers topics from image acquisition through high-quality output. Not only does the book explain in step-by-step detail which buttons to push to get high-quality images, it provides the conceptual underpinnings so users can become proficient on their own. While the book is general in nature, it also refers to the most popular programs and scanners by example, providing users with the detailed information they want while maintaining the conceptual overview they need. One of the central topics of Real World Scanning and Halftones is digital halftoning - explaining how color and gray-scale images are reproduced on the printed page using laser printers and imagesetters. This explanation has never been adequately provided in one place in the depth users need to understand the topic. In addition, the book demystifies the world of OCR, or optical character recognition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This highly useful, detailed guide helps desktop-publishing and other design professionals produce the best possible scans and halftones from their images. The first section focuses on scanning, first featuring explanations of such terms as spi (samples per inch), bit depth, optical and interpolated resolution, and dynamic range. The authors even advise you on buying and cleaning scanners. Next they detail the elements of good scans and how to fix less-than-perfect ones, helping you figure out what sort of file formats and resolutions to use in your work, how to do tonal and color corrections, and how to sharpen and compress images. Finally, the discussion turns to Web and printer output and to OCR technology and PhotoCD images.

The section on halftones teaches you how to produce decent halftone images, first by explaining how halftones work and then by explaining such issues as frequency, gray levels, spot variation, spot gain, spot shapes, and the role of printers and software in creating halftones. There's also a discussion of stochastic screening and how to create blends and reduce moiré and other patterns. The last chapters here help you fine-tune your halftone settings and learn a bit about PostScript operators for halftones and scanning.

The third and last section focuses on using image applications to work with scans, tonal and color corrections, and halftones. This discussion includes Adobe Photoshop, Micrografx Picture Publisher, Corel Photo-Paint, Ulead PhotoImpact, Equilibrium's DeBabelizer, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia FreeHand, CorelDRAW, Adobe PageMaker, and QuarkXPress. The authors also look at a few scanning applications and offer tips on using them.

Throughout the book the authors provide plenty of images and screen shots to illustrate their points, and a full-color section helps bring some of these examples to life. There's lots of technical discussion, but since each chapter builds on the previous ones and the basic terminology is put forth clearly, you can leave off wherever you wish and still have a lot of new knowledge to apply to your scans and halftones. --Kathleen Caster --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

"Editor's Pick! Here's the book we've all been waiting for! You read about the original edition of this book several years ago when it brought sage advice on producing top-notch scans and halftones....They're back! Now the three best-known experts in desktop publishing bring you the latest and greatest in the world of making your scans kick butt!" -- The Design and Publishing Center

"I must tell you that your book is the easiest to understand on the subject." -- Jennifer H.

"It's a real pleasure to find something so well written. I think you people may have written 'the' standard reference! Your clarity of expression and technical precision is wonderful....I couldn't put it down because it reads so well." - -- Robert B.

"One of the best technical books I've ever read!" -- Jeffrey R.

"Thanks again for your fantastic book. Clear writing, logically layed out, and just what the doctor ordered for someone like me." -- Andy F.

"Wow! A very worthy successor to a great classic. This book is simply a 'must-have' for anyone doing any kind of commercial reproduction work." -- Wayne Fulton, author of "a few tips on scanning" book and Web site

"[This] is one of those books which seldom makes it back to the bookshelf, it's always on a desk." -- Format Newsletter

Newly revised and updated for the modern era, Real World Scanning and Halftones, Second Edition is better than everand that's good! David Blatner, Glenn Fleishman and Steve Roth have taken a great book and made it even better. When Real World Scanning and Halftones (the first edition) was published back in 1993, it was focused primarily on scanning and printing grayscale images, since at that time there weren't that many people doing a lot of color work on the desktop. Nowadays, of course, just about every color image you see in print (and all you see online) has been processed digitally -- and probably in Photoshop. So the Second Edition covers desktop color in much more detail, as well as adding sections on web graphics, output to todays color printers, stochastic screening, and other contemporary technologies.

The materials covered address the things that every Photoshop user (and everyone else working with digital images) needs to know. That includes some things that you would expect, plus some welcome surprises: for example, how to get decent output from today's inexpensive inkjet printersthis is information which you will be hard-pressed to find elsewhere; most neophytes who buy a non-PostScript inkjet printer (can you say Epson?) don't realize that they're not based on the traditional CMYK print model.....but 100 years of printing technologies -- as well as the digital advances of more recent years -- typically assume that you are printing to a CMYK device. So if you've got an RGB printer, or something that uses it very own proprietary six-color process (can you say Epson?), in some respects you are in deep, uncharted waters, where many things that are usually taken for granted may no longer apply. You'll find useful information on this and other modern digital conundrums in this book.

The material covered applies to anyone working with digital images -- and if you're working in Photoshop, that's you, regardless of whether you use a Mac or a Wintel PC. There's no CD, but the book does have an associated web site. Real World Scanning and Halftones, Second Edition is an invaluable resource that will help you understand and take control of your digital images, from input, through your adjustments, to your final output. If you own a scanner and you want to get good output, this is a book you'll want to have. In fact, nobody should be allowed to walk out of a computer store with a scanner under their arm without a copy of Real World Scanning and Halftones, Second Edition to go along with it.

-- Copyright 1998 David Herman. Review originally appeared on the PhotoBooks site, the definitive resource for review of books relating to and about Adobe Photoshop. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 298 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Pr; First Edition edition (November 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566090938
• ISBN-13: 978-1566090933
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,015,942 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Better Introduction to Graphic Arts, October 23, 1999

By 

Harry Kelley (Mt. Pleasant, MI US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Real World Scanning Halftones (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

I am a Vice President of Graphic Services for one of the largest ad agencies in the world. I can't recommend this book highly enough for anyone starting a study of scanning and image processing (Photoshop...). I frequently find that if my retouchers are having problems they haven't read this. It's a must.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't buy a scanner without buying this book, May 13, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Real World Scanning Halftones (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

Newly revised and updated for the modern era, Real World Scanning and Halftones, Second Edition is better than ever and that's good! David Blatner, Glenn Fleishman and Steve Roth have taken a great book and made it even better. When Real World Scanning and Halftones (the first edition) was published back in 1993, it was focused primarily on scanning and printing grayscale images, since at that time there weren't that many people doing a lot of color work on the desktop. Nowadays, of course, just about every color image you see in print (and all you see online) has been processed digitallyand probably in Photoshop. So the Second Edition covers desktop color in much more detail, as well as adding sections on web graphics, output to today's color printers, stochastic screening, and other contemporary technologies.

The goal of this book remains to "provide step-by-step, type-in-the-numbers instructions for getting great-quality images out of your scanners, laser printers, and imagesetters, using a variety of software." This is great stuff. It's not mind-numbingly complicated, but it's not brain-dead simple, either, especially if you have no background in the field. Even if you're a scanning and halftone veteran, you'll find lots of practical, useful information and advice in this book.....

(Review originally appeared on PhotoBooks Web site, (c) 1998 David Herman) END

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book on scanning, June 5, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Real World Scanning Halftones (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

This 2nd edition improves on an already very good book on scanning. It adds more information on color, using web graphics, and adds more scanning software explanations.

If you think you need a 1200 dpi scanner for web work, check this book out and find out why you probably don't. The book will save you time and money and show you how to improve your graphic outputs. It's well worth the money.