Scanning With the HP DeskScan II

Selecting an image type

• Drawings
  Drawings, or line art, include only black and white areas with no intermediate shades of gray. Examples include a pen and ink sketch, or something drawn with a pencil. Depending on the amount of detail in the drawing, they can be further classified as spot color or detailed drawings.
  Spot color drawings have large areas of distinct color with little or no detail present. In a true spot color image, the scanner will recognize every point in that color area as the same color value. Detailed drawings, on the other hand, contain various shades of gray and does not lack overall detail as spot color.
• Halftones
  A halftone is an image type that simulates shades of gray or color by varying the number of the dots printed or displayed. When the halftone type is selected, the scanner recognizes each point in the image as either black or white, or as colored or not colored. When the half tone is printed or displayed, dark areas are represented by many black or colored dots, lighter areas are represented by fewer black or colored dots. From a normal viewing distance, the dots blend to create the appearance of a gray or color shade. This scanner's software interface provides six different halftone types. Each type varies the arrangement of dots in a particular way. The selection type depends on the amount of detail contained in the original image. The software provides a feature that prints or displays a selected part of the image in each of the six different halftone types before the final scan is made.
1. Normal
   Normal tends to smooth the image and blend gray tones. Used for images with large areas of continuous tone and few detail.
2. Fine
   Produces good image detail and texture. Use a fine halftone to pick up more detail in the image and maintain smooth blending of gray tones.
3. Extra-Fine
   This gives better image detail but only fair image texture. Used for images with high detail.
4. Vertical Line
   This is recommended for photographs that contain many horizontal lines.
5. Horizontal Lines
   This emphasizes vertical detail and creates good image texture. This is recommended for photographs that contain many vertical lines.
6. Diffusion
   Provides high detail and good texture. Diffusion minimizes interference patterns that can occur when the scanned image is one that has already been halftoned such as a photograph printed in a magazine, book, or newspaper.
• Photos
  Photos, or continuous tone images, appear to have a continuous scale of shades from black to white, with all the grays in between. A black and white photograph is a typical continuous tone image. Color images can also have continuous tones along with their color hues. There are two selections when scanning a photo; black and white (grayscale), or color.
  Grayscale
  Depending on the grayscale image type selected, the scanner reads each point as one of 16 or 256 levels of gray. These image types offer more flexibility and control aver the halftone image type.
  Color
  There are several color image types available, each with varying depths of colors. For best quality, use Millions of Color (24-bit). This scan type produces the largest file sizes, therefore not recommended for use on the Internet. Use Color Photo (256 colors, 8-bit). A much smaller file size and still produces a good reproduction.

• Contrast and Brightness
  Contrast is the range between the darkest and the lightest shades in the image. A high-contrast image has more gray shades between black and white. While contrast determines how many shades of gray, brightness adjusts the intensity of those shades. Brightness is the balance of light and dark shades in an image. The goal in adjusting the contrast and brightness is to create the fullest dynamic range possible for the image.
  This button is the automatic contrast and brightness control. The computer adjusts for what seems to be the optimum ratio between brightness and contrast. Another way to adjust these characteristics of the image is to try the Highlight and Shadow tool, which adjusts brightness and contrast but in a different way.
• Highlight and Shadow
  This tool allows for independent adjustment of the light and dark areas in an image. This tool is useful for color as well as black and white images. The Highlight point you select becomes the lightest value in a continuous or halftone image, where the Shadow point becomes the darkest. If the image being scanned appears to have a small range of grays between the lightest and darkest parts of the image, using highlight and shadow will have the effect of extending the range of grays so that more detail is visible.
• Color Adjustment
  This tool changes the color hue and saturation of a color image. This works best with color halftones or color photos.
  1. Hue
     Hue is the actual color that is mixed form red, green, and blue. If you averaged all the color hues in your image, that hue would be in the center of the hexagon. Thus, you can change the hue by moving any distance form the center.
  2. Saturation
     Saturation is the amount of color in a specific hue and increasing it can give a "bigger than life" appearance to color photos just as some postcards exaggerate the colors of the sky, water, or grass.
• Emphasis
  To improve an image, adjust the middle tones separately from the highlights and shadows. The Emphasis tool helps you visualize the number and distribution of gray tones in the image. Using a curve on a two-dim. display, the Emphasis tool shows the relationship between the grays in the original image and the grays in the scanned image.
  By adjusting the emphasis curve, you can change the original image's tonal range for light, middle, and dark tones. The curve is adjusted up or down to change the gray value representing a given tone at any point. Thus, the gray value from the original image might be translated or mapped to a darker of lighter value upon final scanning. Using a combination of the Emphasis and Highlight and Shadow tools provide the most precise control over the tonal characteristics of a scanned image.
• Sharpening
  Sharpening is a process that emphasizes detail. By enhancing detail and sometimes exaggerating the appearance of the fine details in an image, sharpening can make photographs look much crisper.
  Sharpening can be used to help reduce the size of images because it can compensate for much of the detail lost by scanning at a lower resolution. Be careful not to use a resolution too low or the image will look jagged.

Other Enhancements

This option creates the mirror image of the current scanned image.
This option creates a negative image of the current scan image.
This allows for separate controls of image width and height so as to change the aspect ratio.
This locks the highlight box to the scale controls.