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.

From Book News, Inc.
This guide provides specific recommendations for setting image resolutions on particular types of scanning devices, walks through procedures for correcting and storing images, and explains how halftones work in different mediums. The third edition addresses scanning for web output and updates screenshots to Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Adobe Photoshop CS.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This expanded and updated second edition covers new file types and software applications, and addresses the special concerns of Web publishers.It offers sage advice on producing top-notch scans and halftones from three of the best-known experts in Web and desktop publishing. You'll gain insight into the key scanning technologies and learn valuable techniques that will save you time, money, and hassle.

SYNOPSIS

Here's sage advice on producing top-notch scans and halftones from three of the best-known experts in Web and desktop publishing. Gain insight into the key scanning technologies and learn valuable techniques that will save you time, money, and hassle. This expanded and updated second edition covers new file types and software applications, and addresses the special concerns of Web publishers.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

" You will not find a better source of image information than this."--Design Tools Monthly — Jay Nelson