Real World Scanning and Halftones [Paperback]

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 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

The materials covered address the things that every Photoshop user (and everyone else working with digital images) needs to know. That includes some things that you would expect, plus some welcome surprises: for example, how to get decent output from today's inexpensive inkjet printersthis is information which you will be hard-pressed to find elsewhere; most neophytes who buy a non-PostScript inkjet printer (can you say Epson?) don't realize that they're not based on the traditional CMYK print model.....but 100 years of printing technologies -- as well as the digital advances of more recent years -- typically assume that you are printing to a CMYK device. So if you've got an RGB printer, or something that uses it very own proprietary six-color process (can you say Epson?), in some respects you are in deep, uncharted waters, where many things that are usually taken for granted may no longer apply. You'll find useful information on this and other modern digital conundrums in this book.

The material covered applies to anyone working with digital images -- and if you're working in Photoshop, that's you, regardless of whether you use a Mac or a Wintel PC. There's no CD, but the book does have an associated web site. Real World Scanning and Halftones, Second Edition is an invaluable resource that will help you understand and take control of your digital images, from input, through your adjustments, to your final output. If you own a scanner and you want to get good output, this is a book you'll want to have. In fact, nobody should be allowed to walk out of a computer store with a scanner under their arm without a copy of Real World Scanning and Halftones, Second Edition to go along with it.

-- Copyright 1998 David Herman. Review originally appeared on the PhotoBooks site, the definitive resource for review of books relating to and about Adobe Photoshop. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.