A few scanning tips

by Wayne Fulton

The Scanning basics section is BELOW.

And the Calculator section is BELOW that.

Photography

A few attempts to clarify some mysteries about the basics of flash and digital photography, hopefully helpful. More detail about fundamentals, how it works for those interested (and is good to know when you're ready).
Essential Fundamentals About Digital Images

A Starting Point for Beginning to Learn Photography

Pixels, Printing dpi, Video dpi - What's With That?  First Basic Fundamentals

Image Resize - Cropping, Resampling, Scaling  Basics to use digital photos

White Balance Correction  Click WB Tool on a White thing

Why Should I Shoot Raw?  It's the easy way to get quality

Depth of Field and Hyperfocal  with calculator, and a better way to blur the background

Field of View of Lens and sensor, with calculator

Crop Factor and Equivalent Focal Length, and the WHY of the Magnification illusion

f/stops and shutter speeds  Understanding the numbers, and a few lens properties

File Types, Bit Depth, Image size, Memory size  Details

What are JPG losses?  JPG Artifacts

RGB color  What is Digital Color?

Exposure Metering

How Light Meters Work - Maybe not as assumed

Details about Metering Principles - Including TTL flash

A Histogram is Not a Light Meter - Incident vs. Reflected meters

EV - Exposure Value and EV Chart

Sunny 16 Rule of daylight exposure

18% Gray Card - What's the Idea?

Kodak's Accurate Exposure with your Meter A classic

Do I need a handheld light meter? Sekonic L308S

Surprises in the Use of Histograms Use only the camera's three RGB histograms, NOT the single channel Gray histogram

Histograms are Gamma Encoded The numbers may not be what you think

What and Why is Gamma? with calculator for histogram values

Flash Fundamentals We Must Know

Introduction Basics about light and flash

Inverse Square Law Flash falls off with distance

Guide Numbers and calculator, for Manual flash exposure (even a HSS calculator too)

Bounce Flash, and TTL Flash Compensation

Camera Distance Does Not Affect Exposure

Continuous light vs. Flash - Shutter Speed

Other Differences, Continuous vs Flash

Maximum Sync Speed The shutter limits it, Not the flash

HSS - High Speed Sync, What is it?

What is Soft Light?

Flash pictures are Double Exposures - Learn to use it

Flash Outdoors - Fill Flash in Sunlight

Flash Indoors - Factors affecting TTL exposure

What Hot Shoe Flashes Do

Auto ISO - but for flash?

Rear Curtain Sync - for Blur from Ambient Motion Trails

Matching White Balance of Room Lights - Colored Filters on Flash

Speedlights

A Beginners Guide to Select a Hot Shoe Flash Part 2, chart

Guide Number calculator, even HSS too

Comparing Power of Flashes with Guide Number

Review of Yongnuo YN-565EX Speedlight

Review of Aperlite YH-700N Speedlight

Review of Neewer NW-985N Speedlight

Review of Neewer VK750 II Speedlight

Nikon TTL BL with D-Lens Distance - Lens distance accuracy is poor

Third Party Flash Brands Bypass the D-Lens Distance Problems

Speedlight AA Batteries

Comparisons of Optical Slave Triggers

Speed of Flash Units for High Speed Photography

Nikon TTL history - TTL, D-TTL, iTTL

Lighting

The Main skill is to Learn to Actually "See" the Lighting

A Standard Portrait Lighting Setup

What is Soft Light?

What Umbrellas Do

Mounting Speedlights in Umbrellas

Methods to Trigger Flashes

Nikon CLS Commander Wireless Remote Flash System (AWL)

Lighting Kits for Home Setups - Flash is good for Portraits

Comparing Properties of Speedlights vs Studio Lights

Which is Softer, Reflected or Shoot-through Umbrellas?

Miscellaneous

Scanning Thousands of old Slides with a digital camera

Copying slides with a camera - calculator for macro lens or extension tube math

Curve Tool compared with Levels

Have we hit a megapixel limit?

Diffraction Limited Pixels? Really?

Memory Card Speed How much do we need?

Camera Exif Data Need a good Exif viewer?

Good Books on Flash Photography

Math tips of EV and precise camera numbers - f/stop, shutter, ISO

Solenoid Valve for Water Drop photography

Scanning Basics

This scanning material is about the basics of scanning photos and documents. The purpose here is to offer some scanning tips about using your scanner, and to explain the basics for scanning photos and documents. It is also about the fundamentals of digital images, about the basics to help you get the most from your images from your scanner or camera. How it works, for those who want to know.

Included here are the general questions that we've all asked about digital images. The material is about the basics of scanning, certainly not superficial, but it is not at all difficult either, it is just simply about how it works. It describes in plain language the things we need to know to efficiently get the most from our images, in the various ways that we can use them.

Do realize that a digital camera is a scanner too, and its photos are already digitized (already scanned, so to speak), meaning, that the first preference, instead of scanning photo prints, is to use your original camera file if you still have it.

DPI resolution is one of the first concerns. Many newbies want to scan a photo at the greatest possible resolution. We'll explain why that's the very wrong answer, with tips about how to choose a more appropriate answer to match the actual job. That and many other scanning basics are covered here, and it's intended help newcomers to graphics and scanning of photos and documents. There will be a little technique to learn, but when you've seen it once, then it's rather simple.

Never used a scanner before?

Evaluating Scanner Features

Quick Summary of Digital Basics

Scanning / Printing dpi Calculator

Scanning 101
The Basics

START * Fundamental Concepts

Video Resolution - How much to scan?

Say No to 72 dpi - It's a false notion

File types, Bits, Image size, Memory size

Images for television or PowerPoint

Printing Resolution - Scaling and Resampling

The Scaling Menu - Scaling Output Size

Finding the Scaling and Resampling Menus

Printing Guidelines - Printing dpi

Printer Resolution - How much to scan?

Line art and Threshold - Copy, OCR, Text

Line art and Grayscale

Scanning for Fax

Descreen to remove Moiré Interference
   Images in printed media

Interpolated Resolution

Photo Resolution - How much can we scan?

Image File Formats - Which format?

Transparent Media Adapter - 35 mm slides?

What about Film Scanners?

Dynamic Range - 12 or 16 bits?

A few Links to Other scanning sites

A few Frequently Asked Questions - FAQ

Scanning 201

A Simple Way to Get Better Scans

Histogram

UnSharp Mask sharpening

Clone Tool

Restoration of Genealogical Photos

Correction of Faded Slides

A few Typical
(models discontinued now)
Scanner Software

Acer Mirascan

HP PrecisionScan LT

HP PrecisionScan

HP PrecisionScan Pro

Microtek ScanWizard 5

Microtek ScanWizard Pro 6

Minolta Scan Dual II

Polaroid 4000

Umax VistaScan

Umax MagicScan

VueScan - still going strong!

Search Scantips.com

Google

Web scantips.com

  These are all CALCULATORS, with a few Extra features

Compare 2 camera Exposures, Difference and Equivalents

Compare 2 shutter speeds, f/stops, or ISO values

DPI calculator, Scanning and Printing Resolution

EV and EV Chart

Field of View and Chart and Math

Depth of Field and Hyperfocal, A better way to blur the background

Flash Guide Number, for Manual flash exposure

HSS Guide Number

Four Crop Factor calculators

Exact Aspect Ratio

Determine Distance or Size of an object in image

Histogram Gamma

Maximum image dimensions from Megapixels

Copying slides with a camera, macro lens or extension tubes

Convert Bytes, B, KB, MB, GB, TB

There are 4 Sizes of any digital image

Diffraction In support of Depth of Field

Improved “500 Rule - Stars and Star Trails

Compare Inverse Square Law for 2 distances

Compare 2 Guide Numbers for relative Flash Power

Guide Number of ganged flashes. Exposure of metered Main & Fill

Percentage of Fill Flash of TTL Flash Compensation with Lighting Ratio

Charts of Precise Goal and Nominal values of f/stop, shutter and ISO settings

Chart of "The Numbers" for many sensors & film sizes - More about Depth of Field

Motion blur or camera shake in pixels

Stock Market

50 year S&P 500 performance, concerned withdrawal depletion

Wondering about other stock choices with better earnings? Performance Comparison of 120+ stock and fund tickers

Methods of Stock Market Gains, Compounding, and Annualized Return and 6 calculators

S&P 500 Daily Action and counts of Record Highs in last 5 years

The next three are not calculators, just basic need to know stuff

Dividends are simply a withdrawal which reduces your investment's price, value and future gains. But Reinvesting Dividends puts the value back, and becomes free additional new shares, seriously increasing long term gain.

Basic info about market, investing, and S&P 500

A few important things to know about investing in Bonds

I do try to help with questions about the basics or about my material, but I cannot help with the "what hardware to buy" or "my hardware doesn't work" questions, so those two types of email probably get no response. In particular, I really would appreciate hearing about anything that is "wrong", especially about any problems with the site.

Copyright © 1997-2024 by Wayne Fulton - All rights are reserved.