[Milsurplus] scanning old photos/books

[Wammes Witkop]

Barry,

I agree fully with Roberts treatise on advanced scanning - with one or 
two remarks.
First, your sample turns out to be scanned in color. This makes it way 
too big, as there is no color in the original. And even is this sort of 
picture is called half tone - implying grays - in actual fact it is a 
rendering of grays by using bigger and smaller black dots, as is usually 
the fact with printed pictures. My preferred route is to scan in pure 
black and white at a high resolution and then indeed print at that same 
resolution. Play around with the threshold in order to get the best 
representation of the picture, so the dots do not turn out smaller or - 
worse! - start running together. This way you preserve (most of) the 
screening of the picture. There will always be artifacts, for instance 
because the dot-pattern does not align perfectly with your scanner. But 
results can be quite good.

Regards, Wammes Witkop