There are several methods of acquiring, or producing images to use in your publication, be it printed or output to the web. In this section we will look at:

• Screen capture
• Exporting an image produced in a package such as Corel Draw, or Paint
• Scanning
• Digital Photography

Screen capture



There are a number of packages such as Lview Pro (http://www.lview.com) that allow screen capture, and the manipulation of that captured image, However if you have Adobe Photoshop on your PC there is another way.

Have the detail you wish to capture visible on the desktop, in this example we will capture Corel Draw’s Uniform fill window.

Press the ‘Print Scrn’ (print screen) button on the computer’s keyboard, this will capture the screen to the computer’s memory.

Open the graphics package you wish to work on the image with (Photoshop, Lview, etc.).

If Photoshop you will be presented with the new image dialogue box

If the details in the dialogue box are acceptable to you, click ‘OK and you will be presented with a new window (Fig 2) with a blank image. Selecting ‘Paste’ from the ‘File’ menu. or pressing keys ‘Ctrl’ and ‘V’ (the Paste command) at the same time will cause captured screen to be pasted into the file (Fig 3).



Fig 2



Fig 3

Using Photoshop’s marquee tool, select the area of the image you are interested in and draw a box over it (Fig 4)



Fig 4

Pulling down the ‘Image’ menu from Photoshop’s menu bar will allow you to ‘Crop’ the image to the area you selected (Fig 5).



Fig 5

You can now save the image in an appropriate file format.



Exporting an image from a package

All graphics packages allow you to export your work,in a number of file formats. in this example we will use Paint, however the same actions will be available in packages such as Adobe Illustrator.

Having finished your artwork, pull down the ‘File’ Menu, and move the cursor down to ‘Save As’ and click on the mouse button (Fig 6).



Fig 6



You will then be asked to choose a location for the file to be exported to and you can define the file format you wish to export, for example you may select .GIF for a file to go onto the internet, or .BMP if the image is to be ingluded in a Microsoft ‘Word’ document.



Scanning

Scanners are now an inexpensive way of acquiring images, with good quality scanners available for as little as £60.00. Before scanning an image, you should think about what you intend to do with it. A full colour, A4 sized picture can be as large as 25 Megabytes, if scanned at 300 DPI (dots per inch). And 25 Gigabytes at 9600 DPI. 300DPI is an average resolution for a laser printer, with some specialist printers capable of 9600 DPI.

Visit the Epson site

The scanner, once installed will have software associated with it and although the packages may differ, the way the software works will remain the same. Most scanner packages will associate themselves with packages such as Photoshop and selecting ‘Import’ or ‘Acquire’ from the packages ‘File’ menu will start the scanner software and you will be able to bring the image directly into the graphics package.

If however the image is destined for the Internet, there are different factors to be aware of. Someone with a direct (networked) connection to the internet will hardly notice a good sized (less than 500Kb) image affecting the download time if the web page, however someone with a modem connection, will have to wait for a considerable time for the image to appear.

A good quality image for the web, such as the following, which is at 256 colours is 28Kb and will download very quickly.

 



Digital Cameras

Ok so I have the same qualifications as (British) Police and medical photographers (C&G 745 Scientific & Medical Photography) And when I saw my first Digital camera I thought it was a load of @#!!#*&. I have a Canon A1 Film camera, two Nikons and two 5" x 4" plate cameras, which are now a waste of space!, as I've just got my third Digital camera (in about as many years). 35mm Film is dead! for most uses



Pocket, Mid range Nikon 5700 (my last one), and my latest, the Canon EOS350D.

 

 

They have had a tremendous effect on the immediacy of getting an image, and publishing it, be that on low to reasonable quality printing, or onto the web.

It is possible to take a photograph with a digital camera and have that image in the internet in less than five minutes.





Quality of image

There is only really one issue you need to consider, What are you going to do with the image, print or PC?. Even a low end colour printer will turn out gobsmackingly good results if the image is printed on a good quality paper, with the right settings. As far as putting stuff on the web is concerned the same sort of quality is a hinderance, and will cause images to take an age to download and the viewer to get fed up and go away. Following you will see two images I took with a mid range digital the Fuji S304, set at macro, the first is at 33.3% (a third) of the actual size, the latter at 66.7%.





Many of the same constraints as we saw with scanners still apply with one good quality digital photograph at about 6.2MB, that is to say that the image is so large that it would have to be put onto 4.3 floppy disks!.



Card Adaptors

Most digital cameras now come with removable memory in the form of a card, many of these memory cards will fit into an adaptor, which if used with its software will allow far faster transfer of images than by connecting the camera to a serial, or on most cases a USB port. The USB Card Adaptor shown will handle eight different types of memory card.





© Allen. C. Roffey 21:47 13/01/2006