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The most appealing view of a scanned coin image will appear to have the light shining down from above the figure. This is achieved by orienting the coin so that the bottom of the design will be the first place |
reached by the moving scanner lamp. Oriented like this the last position of the lamp will appear to be "above" the coin, and the light will seem to shine down from above. |
Normally an object is placed on a scanner bed so that the top is nearest the origin of the lamp, so in this respect a coin will scan best if it is placed on the scanner bed upside down. |
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Notice the low setting for resolution and the very high setting for magnification (scaling). |
Once the coin has been positioned on the scanner bed, it is time to set the software which will control the scanning process. When the scanning software first comes up, there is no coin visible in the preview area (on left). There is a scale on the left in this view, which registers the distance the lamp will travel down the length of the scanner bed. Here it has been set for a minimum "sweep," which in the case of this unit is four inches.
The next series of settings allow for adjustment of the scan mode, resolution, and scaling (or magnification). "Color" has been selected for the scan mode. The resolution setting is at the minimum for this unit, which is 72 DPI. Why so low? Won't the picture look better with more detail at a higher resolution?
A setting of 72 DPI corresponds to the normal resolution of a monitor screen. For images that will only be viewed on screen, not only is this enough resolution, it is the optimum resolution. But won't the details of the image be fuzzy and indistinct? They will generally look okay as long as you don't look too closely at the image, but as soon as you try to get a close look, via magnification, things will blur very quickly. However, there is a useful trick to get around this.
In order to take a close look at an image you must magnify it, which can be done easily in most viewer software. In order to keep the image from blurring or pixellating upon magnification, the original image should already be magnified during the scanning process. This is a better approach than setting a high resolution. To preserve maximum detail, set the magnification as high as your software will allow. You will notice in the illustration above that the setting of 803% (8x magnification) is not the maximum amount of scaling that could be set by the slide control. However, for this particular scanner and its software, a magnification setting above 803% for a resolution of 72 DPI would actually produce an image no greater than normal size (100% or 1:1). Increasing the resolution forces a significant decrease in the maximum magnification, and will not produce a better image on screen.
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When the settings have all been made and the scanning window has been resized, you are ready to scan the coin. This software is reporting a large anticipated file size based on a default TIF image format with the given dimensions and parameters. Note that despite the low resolution, the high magnification will result in a very large file. This is very useful if you decide later to convert the image into one with a higher resolution and smaller dimensions (as you would do for hardcopy publication).
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Next:Scanning the Coin |
