Quote:
Originally Posted by Studio717
Can you be a bit more specific about the actual image-taking stage? Do you use the glass on each page?
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The heavy glass serves to flatten the pages. It is five millimeters thick. An anti-glare glass would be nice, but I use just ordinary glass and it is ok with my lighting arrangement.
For single sheets of paper documents it is not necessary to use the glass unless the sheets are creased, like the ones that come folded in the envelopes.
In case of multipage documents, magazines, and books, I manually set the focus for the first page (i.e. I let the camera to focus automatically and if I am happy with the result, I fix it for the rest of the pages). The automatic focus for all the pages can work as well but some of the pages can have no print in the middle, where camera focuses, and the image will be blurred. If the first or cover page is like that and the camera cannot get the focus right, I use any printed page to put it over the book in the cradle to set and fix the focus before photoscanning the book.
My Canon connected to a computer allows me to zoom, set the focus, and change all kind of camera settings without touching the camera itself, with the results seen in a compter window (in a viewfinder, preview or downloaded image window).
For my other compact cameras (both Casio - 8 and 10 megapixels), which cannot shoot from the computer, I use a universal remote trigger that can be attached to the camera (I bought it in a photo accessories shop). I let the camera set the focus automatically for all the pages, however for the pages that have nothing to focus on in their middle, I put a half sheet of printed paper over the blank part to make the focus possible. The image has to be later cleared of that manually at the processing stage.
As for the zoom, it is a good idea to set it to such an extent that the whole page of the book (with no background visible) is in the picture frame. However, not all paper documents or books have the format proportions of the camera photos, so you wil have a background in the view whatever is your zoom, unless you zoom in to see only a part of the original image. With thick books it is advisable to adjust the cradle position every 20 pages or so in order to get the picture without the opposite page getting in the view (the middle part of the book moves a little with the turning of pages).
The background itself is a v-shaped black matt piece of paperboard that I put in the cradle. It is black because some programs make it easy to remove the black background automatically for mono images (it is much more tricky for color images).
For single sheets of documents that are not in color, there is no need to worry about zooming and background. The black border background can be taken care automatically in batch in the processing stage.
As a matter of fact, I am too impatient at the photo taking stage to adjust the cradle every so often. I let the black background margins and a fragment of the opposite page to be in the frame and I cut the margins in the processing stage. For that (cutting margins) it is important that the book pages are always in the same place in the cradle. Therefore, I use a "delimiter", a v-shaped stiff black piece of carboard one or two centimeters wide, one or two millimeters thick (v wings about 2 centimetrs high) that I put at the edge of my black backgroud paper in the cradle, and I always push the book against it.
Once the position of the cradle, camera zoom and focus are set, I shoot all the odd pages first by turning the pages and flattening them with glass, and then I reverse the book and shoot all the even pages. After downloading the images from the camera, I put the first half of images (odd pages) in a separate folder and the second part (even pages) in another folder. Now I can cut the margins in batch automatically - separately for odd and even images (there are programs that can set the cutting parameters different for odd and even pages in one batch). Next, I rename the images in the folders automatically using Irfanview, so that odd images are 0001.jpg, 0003. jpg, etc., and even images are 0952.jpg, 0900.jpg, etc. The even images are in the reverse order since the book was reversed in the cradle for the shooting. I do not bother with pages being in horizontal or upside down position. My OCR program takes care of it. However one can rotate all images in the batch (separately for odd and even pages) automatically with Irfanview of Picasa (recommended).
Now, the two batches go into one folder, and can be processed by OCR or any other program and converted to pdf.
For small booklets or magazines I do not shoot odd and even pages separately but I reverse the original after every shot. Than I crop margins manually in Picasa.
For single sheet documents the whole workflow is much more simple. Just taking a shot a replacing the sheet. Five seconds per page. After downloading images from the camera (Picasa recommended) you can review them and improve by cropping and fine tuning if you wish.
BTW. Apart from anything else, the scanners are much too slow for book copying. They are really good for a batch of single sheet documents fed by an automatic feeder.