Ooh, I got the Waterhouse-Hayward technique working with the flatbed scanner; it’s wonderful! Check out what happens when a dead mollusk collaborates with several years of intense surf. [Series intro here.]

Eroded sea-shell from Cape Conran
· · ·
Eroded sea-shell from Cape Conran

Obviously, two sides of the same shell. The first shows a flat face so it’s just lying on the scanner. It wouldn’t lie flat for the second so I had to suspend one end with thread, and indeed when one end’s grounded the other eventually stops oscillating.

Um, I suppose I should record the equipment; it’s a CanoScan 3000F plugged via USB into a white-box running Windows XP and the CanoScan Toolbox software. There’s still room for improvement. I haven’t figured out how to tell the scanner to just scan the corner where the shell is, which means I’m scanning at only 300DPI; the scanner can go way higher, but when you scan the whole 8½x11" area at more than 300DPI, it complains about digital artifacts larger than 100MB. This is good enough for the screen, but if I want to print I’ll need a few hundred more DPI.



Contributions

Comment feed for ongoing:Comments feed

From: dr2chase (Mar 16 2007, at 06:19)

Get a Mac (you've got a Mac, don't you?), get Vuescan.

[link]

From: John Cowan (Mar 16 2007, at 07:13)

Wow. It's huge how much difference it makes to have that depth of field. Your other shell pix looked like chunks of bone by comparison.

[link]

From: G Gollings (Mar 16 2007, at 10:13)

I would expect you could just click-n-drag in the scan preview window to define a crop---perhaps it isn't that simple, I'm not sure. The 'Specify the Scan Area' part of this Canon publication may be helpful:

http://download.canon.com.au/manuals/basic_scanning.pdf

When scaling through scanning-at-higher-resolutions, it is possibly beneficial to jump to the scanner's 'native' resolutions, rather than picking an arbitrary 735dpi, or whatever. I think the rationale was to avoid software interpolation, so this might imply you need to fix the scanner scaling setting at 100%, 1200dpi (initial width and height being set by the crop you draw). There is also a distinct possibility that I am making this up, memory is fickle ;-P

[link]

From: Brian Utterback (Mar 19 2007, at 10:53)

So, how did you get it to work?

[link]

author · Dad
colophon · rights

March 16, 2007
· The World (148 fragments)
· · Places
· · · Australia (29 more)
· Arts (11 fragments)
· · Photos (980 more)

By .

The opinions expressed here
are my own, and no other party
necessarily agrees with them.

A full disclosure of my
professional interests is
on the author page.

I’m on Mastodon!