[.ca] Real World Scanning and Halftones (ISBN 0321241320)

From Amazon.com:
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. --Kathleen Caster

I'd call this a "Try it.":
Frequently, I find that I have to buy books that are overly technical for my purposes in order to get all the info I want. This book suits me, (though it may not suit the needs of a graphics profession). There are no buyer's guides to specific models of scanners here. However, there is a lot of detail about how scanners, scanning software and graphics programs work. The authors provide such arcana as the formula for determining what size a scanned image will be (depending on the options you pick) and goodies like this. There is info on file formats, compression, how to choose resolution and what influences the outcome of scans and how to correct the result. There is also a lot of information most applicable to professional print work, for which I have no particular use, except that info of this type helps to fill out my picture of how digital imaging works. If you want suggestions for scanning projects to do with your kids, look elsewhere, but if you're interested in the theory of scanners I would recommend this book. I'll also mention that, in my view, the writing is clear and well-organized and if I occasionally must pause to consider it's only because the material requires a little thought. This is not rocket science, but neither is it Sponge Bob and the authors treat it accordingly.

What I didn't know, I didn't know about digital halftones.:
When the author suggested that the proper way to read this book was cover to cover. I thought sure every author wants you to hang on every word. What I found was in reading cover to cover was little insights from page to page created a new model about halftones and how they relate to image setters and laser printers. I continually got "so thats why". I recommend this book to all my customers as a definitive source for scanning and output. It takes a subject that is a mystery to us printers born or trained before 1980 and clearly mates our analog knowledge with the digital world we now work in. I'm 60 and run an answer line for digital plate distributors.

Too basic, no meat:
I bought the book sight unseen based on the glowing reviews here. I wanted to get specific, detailed insight to which scanners worked well, and how to get great and consistant color out of them. I got none of that. There was no detailed instruction on how to make and use color profiles with scanners. They talk "about" scanning quite a lot, but give no hard specifics. Often the advice is that "more expensive scanners work better." That's something that I didn't need the book to tell me. It does cover a great deal of basics for first-timer users, but little for people who already know how to pump pixels. Every time I thougt it might get into some of the details I wanted, the chapter ended. It is written too casually for me. It appears to be written by a few guys who have been around publishing. It reads like a collection of casual "shop talk," more than hard info. The authors occasionally get in over their heads technically and make some mistakes trying to explain things that they admit they don't understand, like how JPEG compression works. I returned my copy, a great thing about Amazon. I got nothing out of it. One cool trick they suggested for Photoshop didn't even work. (c) 2000 kenrockwell.com

Great title...:
I've learned some thngs from this book, however like one other reviewer stated, just when you thought it was going to get to the good stuff, some stupid flip remark would be made and the chapter or discussiong would end. Very difficult reading. Too much about prepress. Not enough about photoshop, scanning and color management. Reads like childish manerishums. Author's have very immature writing styles.

Author notes: 3rd Edition Entirely Revised:
As one of the authors of the third edition of the book (2004), let me tell you that the third edition (2004) has been entirely revised, redesigned, and overhauled. Keep that in mind as you read reviews below of the 2nd (1998) and 1st editions (1993). In the latest edition, we've restructured the book around the scanning and digitzing workflow: starting with scanners and digital cameras; moving through correction; then into output onto ink jet, film, screen, and (extensively) offset press as halftones. Our Web site at www dot rwsh dot com contains a downloadable chapter and other information about the book, or you can use Amazon.com's Inside the Book feature to read pages here.