Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

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.

When the author suggested that the proper way to read this book was cover to cover. I thought sure every author wants you to hang on every word. What I found was in reading cover to cover was little insights from page to page created a new model about halftones and how they relate to image setters and laser printers. I continually got "so thats why". I recommend this book to all my customers as a definitive source for scanning and output. It takes a subject that is a mystery to us printers born or trained before 1980 and clearly mates our analog knowledge with the digital world we now work in. I'm 60 and run an answer line for digital plate distributors.

I bought the book sight unseen based on the glowing reviews here.

I wanted to get specific, detailed insight to which scanners worked well, and how to get great and consistant color out of them.

I got none of that. There was no detailed instruction on how to make and use color profiles with scanners.

They talk "about" scanning quite a lot, but give no hard specifics. Often the advice is that "more expensive scanners work better." That's something that I didn't need the book to tell me.

It does cover a great deal of basics for first-timer users, but little for people who already know how to pump pixels.

Every time I thougt it might get into some of the details I wanted, the chapter ended.

It is written too casually for me. It appears to be written by a few guys who have been around publishing. It reads like a collection of casual "shop talk," more than hard info. The authors occasionally get in over their heads technically and make some mistakes trying to explain things that they admit they don't understand, like how JPEG compression works.

I returned my copy, a great thing about Amazon. I got nothing out of it. One cool trick they suggested for Photoshop didn't even work. (c) 2000 kenrockwell.com

This is an excellent book if you want to understand resolution when scanning images for the web or print. It gets to the technical side of frequencies (DPI, LPI)for output to imagesetters. It also gives you a window of understanding in the areas of cells within a dot (platner's rule of 16). This is hepfull when dealing with halftones and process color images (CMYK). You will be able to comprehend why these four transluecent colors when blended together can give you such a wide spectrum of color by utilizing shadow dots,highlight dots and midtone dots.

I found the book to contain much valuable information on graphics procedures. I'm just learning about scanning and image processing and this book has told me more in one evening than I've managed to dredge up in the last month. I'm really looking forward to a new edition. After all, 4 years in computer years is a looong time. Yet even saying that, the information is still invaluable.

I've learned some thngs from this book, however like one other reviewer stated, just when you thought it was going to get to the good stuff, some stupid flip remark would be made and the chapter or discussiong would end. Very difficult reading. Too much about prepress. Not enough about photoshop, scanning and color management. Reads like childish manerishums. Author's have very immature writing styles.

This is an excellent blend of specific, useful detail about particular software applications (as of 1993) and general information about halftones. It rarely becomes too technical, and never too insubstantial. The book is worth keeping as a reference, and, if there were a second edition, I would buy it without hesitation

This is one of the most informative, useful books on digital phototgraphy that I have read. One very nice feature is that it describes what a typical consumer can do with home pictures and distinguishes that from what professionals and near-professionals will want to do. Describing this spectrum and the trade-offs lets the readers decide what effort they want to make. Most books by professionals only describe professional level work and assume the reader will devote the large amount of money and time needed for that level. It would be great if other books would follow this strategy of talking about the range of options and trade-offs -- among other things that helps the reader start simple and advance over time. This book also has clear explanations of technical issues.