I am trying to scan objects on a flat scanner. I use older Mac scanners (Umax) because they cost little and unlike many of the new scanners they actually have some field of depth (newer scanners typically will show areas of the object as increasingly blurry as they fall away from the scan glass).
If you place the scanner lid, or a piece of paper over the objects in place of the lid, you get shadows which I do not want. If you leave the lid open you get a black blackground, which will not work with dark objects. My objective is to delete the background, have no shadows, and place only an image of the scanned object in a picture with a transparent white background.
To get rid of shadows I am attempting to use a lightbox, which is placed upside down about 3 inches above the scanner glass so that its light shines toward the scanner glass during scanning. This is mentioned in the following article:
๑۩۞۩๑ PHOTO-VINC ๑۩۞۩๑ - Article on flatbed scanner photography
I save my images as tiffs; however, to show you an example on the web the following is a jpeg.
As you can see (as noted in the above article) I am getting blue bands from the light box from overexposure. At first this might not seem bad, but the problem is that the blue banding extends into the edges of item so that attempting to remove say shades of blue will remove these areas also. The lightbox only uses a small 8 watt 12" long fluorescent daylight tube (T-5 Lamp Miniature Bi-Pin Base 12" Daylight: Light Bulbs Etc, Inc.), but still produces overexposure banding.
I removed the opaque plastic from the lightbox and placed it over the scanner with a halogen lamp. This time I got no horizontal bading, but did get a couple lines vertical orange thin lines across a couple items, and the background was turned pinkinsh / samon.
So I guess the key here is to:
(a) Figure what type of light to use to eliminate the banding or to produce a overexposure effect that can be easily selected in mass with the magic wand tool and eliminated.
(b) Assuming "a" can't be done; how to easily remove said banding without touching the objects and without requiring one to hand select all the pixels - I'm looking for something fast.
If you place the scanner lid, or a piece of paper over the objects in place of the lid, you get shadows which I do not want. If you leave the lid open you get a black blackground, which will not work with dark objects. My objective is to delete the background, have no shadows, and place only an image of the scanned object in a picture with a transparent white background.
To get rid of shadows I am attempting to use a lightbox, which is placed upside down about 3 inches above the scanner glass so that its light shines toward the scanner glass during scanning. This is mentioned in the following article:
๑۩۞۩๑ PHOTO-VINC ๑۩۞۩๑ - Article on flatbed scanner photography
I save my images as tiffs; however, to show you an example on the web the following is a jpeg.
As you can see (as noted in the above article) I am getting blue bands from the light box from overexposure. At first this might not seem bad, but the problem is that the blue banding extends into the edges of item so that attempting to remove say shades of blue will remove these areas also. The lightbox only uses a small 8 watt 12" long fluorescent daylight tube (T-5 Lamp Miniature Bi-Pin Base 12" Daylight: Light Bulbs Etc, Inc.), but still produces overexposure banding.
I removed the opaque plastic from the lightbox and placed it over the scanner with a halogen lamp. This time I got no horizontal bading, but did get a couple lines vertical orange thin lines across a couple items, and the background was turned pinkinsh / samon.
So I guess the key here is to:
(a) Figure what type of light to use to eliminate the banding or to produce a overexposure effect that can be easily selected in mass with the magic wand tool and eliminated.
(b) Assuming "a" can't be done; how to easily remove said banding without touching the objects and without requiring one to hand select all the pixels - I'm looking for something fast.