#scanning

[myfandomrealitea]

I hate hearing older generations crow about how self-checkouts are isolating the elderly and getting honest people fired because self-checkouts also enable autistic and neurodivergent and anti-social people to shop in safety and peace without having a breakdown at the counter because the cashier won't stop asking about your day or if you have a membership card.

Checkout systems should be a 25/75 or 50/50 split.

Old people should not have to wrestle with the untameable beast that is a faulty self-checkout scanner and I, your neighbourhood anti-social autistic, should not have to dread shopping because Kathy is legally obliged to ask me 42 questions before she takes my money.

"Eradicate self-checkouts!"

I would literally rather starve to death than have to engage in More Human Interaction just to buy food. Its already bad enough when I have to apologetically smile at the checkout supervisor because my machine is having an aneurysm over my can of Red Bull.

[katsuki-nikiforov]

All of my Yuuri paper sketch in 1 week

[a-large-pillar-of-salt]

"IT WAS MY FUCKING LIFE, TOO!" - An Interview with Dana Crumb

Written by Robert Dupree and taken from Subliminal Tattoo's 1996 Women's Special. Scanned in full for you to read. Think it's pretty important historically speaking. Give it a look.

Spent a long time scanning this interview with Dana Crumb regarding R Crumb's behaviour, examples of racism, antisemitism, abuse because I could not find it online and think it's pretty important when people try and soften Crumb's image and bury a pretty nasty side of comics history. Most important I think is this quote which is a pretty big smoking gun in my opinion:

Just something to consider when you read about comics history or see a lot of newer artists praising Crumb once-more or using recent quotes about him no longer wanting to make art. He was complicit in the endorsement of the KKK and was a financially and psychologically abusive man, and possibly abused his daughter. Comics history is never black and white, and some of the greatest innovators can also be some of the largest stains communally.

[2022dirt]

Cats sitting on printer scanners.

[empty-movement]

May I ask what scanners / equipment / software you're using in the utena art book project? I'm an artist and half the reason I rarely do traditional art is because I'm never happy with the artwork after it's scanned in. But the level of detail even in the blacks of Utena's uniform were all captured so beautifully! And even the very light colors are showing up so well! I'd love to know how you manage!

You know what's really fun? This used to be something you put in your site information section, the software and tools used! Not something that's as normal anymore, but let's give it a go, sorry it's long because I don't know what's new information and what's not! Herein: VANNA'S 'THIS IS AS SPECIFIC AS MY BREAK IS LONG' GUIDE/AIMLESS UNEDITED RAMBLE ABOUT SCANNING IMAGES

Scanning: Modern scanners, by and large, are shit for this. The audience for scanning has narrowed to business and work from home applications that favor text OCR, speed, and efficiency over archiving and scanning of photos and other such visual media. It makes sense--there was a time when scanning your family photographs and such was a popular expected use of a scanner, but these days, the presumption is anything like that is already digital--what would you need the scanner to do that for? The scanner I used for this project is the same one I have been using for *checks notes* a decade now. I use an Epson Perfection V500. Because it is explicitly intended to be a photo scanner, it does threebthings that at this point, you will pay a niche user premium for in a scanner: extremely high DPI (dots per inch), extremely wide color range, and true lossless raws (BMP/TIFF.) I scan low quality print media at 600dpi, high quality print media at 1200 dpi, and this artbook I scanned at 2400 dpi. This is obscene and results in files that are entire GB in size, but for my purposes and my approach, the largest, clearest, rawest copy of whatever I'm scanning is my goal. I don't rely on the scanner to do any post-processing. (At these sizes, the post-processing capacity of the scanner is rendered moot, anyway.) I will replace this scanner when it breaks by buying another identical one if I can find it. I have dropped, disassembled to clean, and abused this thing for a decade and I can't believe it still tolerates my shit. The trade off? Only a couple of my computers will run the ancient capture software right. LMAO. I spent a good week investigating scanners because of the insane Newtype project on my backburner, and the quality available to me now in a scanner is so depleted without spending over a thousand on one, that I'd probably just spin up a computer with Windows 7 on it just to use this one. That's how much of a difference the decade has made in what scanners do and why. (Enshittification attacks! Yes, there are multiple consumer computer products that have actually declined in quality over the last decade.)

Post-processing: Photoshop. Sorry. I have been using Photoshop for literally decades now, it's the demon I know. While CSP is absolutely probably the better piece of software for most uses (art,) Photoshop is...well it's in the name. In all likelihood though, CSP can do all these things, and is a better product to give money to. I just don't know how. NOTENOTENOTE: Anywhere I discuss descreening and print moire I am specifically talking about how to clean up *printed media.* If you are scanning your own painting, this will not be a problem, but everything else about this advice will stand! The first thing you do with a 2400 dpi scan of Utena and Anthy hugging? Well, you open it in Photoshop, which you may or may not have paid for. Then you use a third party developer's plug-in to Descreen the image. I use Sattva. Now this may or may not be what you want in archiving!!! If fidelity to the original scan is the point, you may pass on this part--you are trying to preserve the print screen, moire, half-tones, and other ways print media tricks the eye. If you're me, this tool helps translate the raw scan of the printed dots on the page into the smooth color image you see in person. From there, the vast majority of your efforts will boil down to the following Photoshop tools: Levels/Curves, Color Balance, and Selective Color. Dust and Scratches, Median, Blur, and Remove Noise will also be close friends of the printed page to digital format archiver. Once you're happy with the broad strokes, you can start cropping and sizing it down to something reasonable. If you are dealing with lots of images with the same needs, like when I've scanned doujinshi pages, you can often streamline a lot of this using Photoshop Actions.

My blacks and whites are coming out so vivid this time because I do all color post-processing in Photoshop after the fact, after a descreen tool has been used to translate the dot matrix colors to solids they're intended to portray--in my experience trying to color correct for dark and light colors is a hot mess until that process is done, because Photoshop sees the full range of the dots on the image and the colors they comprise, instead of actually blending them into their intended shades. I don't correct the levels until I've descreened to some extent.

As you can see, the print pattern contains the information of the original painting, but if you try to correct the blacks and whites, you'll get a janky mess. *Then* you change the Levels:

If you've ever edited audio, then dealing with photo Levels and Curves will be familiar to you! A well cut and cleaned piece of audio will not cut off the highs and lows, but also will make sure it uses the full range available to it. Modern scanners are trying to do this all for you, so they blow out the colors and increase the brightness and contrast significantly, because solid blacks and solid whites are often the entire thing you're aiming for--document scanning, basically. This is like when audio is made so loud details at the high and low get cut off. Boo.

What I get instead is as much detail as possible, but also at a volume that needs correcting:

Cutting off the unused color ranges (in this case it's all dark), you get the best chance of capturing the original black and white range:

In some cases, I edit beyond this--for doujinshi scans, I aim for solid blacks and whites, because I need the file sizes to be normal and can't spend gigs of space on dust. For accuracy though, this is where I'd generally stop.

For scanning artwork, the major factor here that may be fucking up your game? Yep. The scanner. Modern scanners are like cheap microphones that blow out the audio, when what you want is the ancient microphone that captures your cat farting in the next room over. While you can compensate A LOT in Photoshop and bring out blacks and whites that scanners fuck up, at the end of the day, what's probably stopping you up is that you want to use your scanner for something scanners are no longer designed to do well. If you aren't crazy like me and likely to get a vintage scanner for this purpose, keep in mind that what you are looking for is specifically *a photo scanner.* These are the ones designed to capture the most range, and at the highest DPI. It will be a flatbed. Don't waste your time with anything else.

Hot tip: if you aren't scanning often, look into your local library or photo processing store. They will have access to modern scanners that specialize in the same priorities I've listed here, and many will scan to your specifications (high dpi, lossless.)

Ahem. I hope that helps, and or was interesting to someone!!!

[akhmadbaev]

SCNLLN-n04, 2025

[kply-industries]

[calcifiedred]

[wayfire-official]

While setting up printing with @cups-official has been surprisingly easy, and scanning with sane has also been pretty easy when the scanner is connected via USB, i seem to be completely unable to talk to it over the network. And looking around on the Internet it seems like you're supposed to have the scanner connected to a computer via usb, that is then able to distribute access over the network. but honestly that sounds really stupid.

Why can i just easily print but when i wanna do the opposite i suddenly have to have a physical connection?

[heckyeahponyscans]

What kind of scanner do you use for the comic pages?

an Epson Perfection V33 :)

If you're interested in scanning books or comics, the main things are a) make sure it's a FLATBED scanner (meaning you lay the page down on the scanner rather than running it through an auto document feed) and b) make sure it's big enough. The G1 My Little Pony comics have oversize pages so I had to find a scanner that had a big enough scanning space to accommodate them.

[silvermoon424]

I've been following you for so long and you've been giving us scans for so long that I don't think I've ever heard how you started your whole scanning thing. I'm curious!

You can thank this doujinshi panel of Rei for starting me on this journey:

I was and still am very much into manga coloring, and when I saw a lower-res version of this pic I was dying to get a better version to color. This was in 2013, I think. I somehow managed to find out what doujinshi it was in (it's in a standalone doujinshi, but it's also collected in an anthology called Moon Fight 4) which I found on eBay. I bought it, scanned it, and from there I was hooked on collecting and scanning doujinshi, artbooks, etc.

Around 2014 I finally managed to figure out how to buy from proxy services and that's when my doujinshi/anime collection really took off because I was able to buy directly from Japan instead of from the limited stock and inflated prices on Western sites like eBay.

I didn't have an actual scanner until.... 2018, I think? For like 4-5 years I literally just took pictures on my phone and cleaned them up in Photoshop, lol. My later pictures are surprisingly good but obviously actual scans are way better!

But yeah, you can thank this picture of Rei for all the scans and scanlations I've provided over the years!

[a-large-pillar-of-salt]

Cathode Slave by Patty Leidy taken from Subliminal Tattoo's 1996 Women's Special

[etakeh]

What I need to do is go to an old folks home and offer to scan in all of their slides, negatives, and old photos. Transcribe their journals, newspaper clippings and recipes.

I've got the equipment and the ability.

I could probably make a mint, but as with all of my brilliant ideas, I have no idea where I would even start.

Anyone know any old people? I only know one, and I'm already digitizing her past for free, but she did tell me I should be getting paid a lot of money for it.

Who's going to argue with a 91-year-old woman who just interested me with her entire photo collection, going back to the early 1900s.

(my grandma)

[galactictomorrowgame]

1/14/25-1/17/25

MASSIVE HUD updates

Added the option to display scan boxes on the object that's being scanned, on the right side of the screen, or both

Added a custom cursor

Added boxes around the zone name and ship options

Added toggle-able information about the zones

NPC ships can now be scanned

Updated targeting icon for enemy ships

All info boxes are now in front of the ship

Changed Kublai Khan engine sound