Reviews of Start with a Scan
Alex Gaw of MicrotekUSA
The 2nd edition of this lavishly illustrated book retains the same winning format as that of the previous edition. The graphics are completely new, juxtaposed once more with the lucid text in eye-catching, attractive layouts. The content is similar to that of the first edition, with some minor reworking in the first 11 chapters. The last two chapters are new: Using Scans in Arts and Crafts (Chapter 12, replacing “Creating 3D Illustrations” in the old book); and Scanning for the Web (Chapter 13, replacing “Multimedia Projects”).
This is one of our favorite books and deservedly so: beautifully explained and handsomely packaged. Most importantly, it’s a delightful treasure trove of information on all things scanning. You’ll come out after reading this book and following through its numerous step-by-step examples with renewed enthusiasm for your scanner and graphics program. We can’t recommend it enough!
Mike Caputo, reviewer for Amazon.com
The art of mixed media has taken on new meaning in the digital production environment, and the second edition of Start with a Scan guides new artists through the maze of image acquisition, hardware, and software toward the goal of final output. This is not just a book on scanning and creating art, but about the art and science of scanning, editing, and tailoring an image to your needs, too.
Beginning by explaining how scanners work, the different types of scanners that are out there, and why it's important to know how the scanned image will be used, the book quickly digs into the meat and potatoes of editing, altering, tracing, and otherwise changing a scanned image to suit a project.
Arguably the most interesting chapters are "Creating Textures and Backgrounds from Print and Paper" and "Transforming Photos into Graphics." One of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks that a designer faces is finding and creating background elements and graphics. In these two chapters, which probably are worth the cover price alone, Scan explains how to use scanned photos or raw elements (cloth, paper, and so on) to create the element that you need.
Although the book deals with digital tools (e.g., scanners and computers), it hardly could be called a computer graphics book. The goal is teaching how to scan and alter images, and Scan never loses sight of that. The authors deserve a great deal of credit for creating what is an educational and inspirational book on a form of visual art that happens to use computers as tools, instead of a computer book that happens to talk about digital graphics. This is how books of the genre should be written.
Worth Reading column in Design Tools Monthly, November 2000
Start with a Scan, 2nd edition shows how you can turn a scan of almost anything into high-quality art using Photoshop, FreeHand and Illustrator. Its beautiful four-color pages explain how to make collages, create textures from scans of paper or cloth, develop type treatments, add or remove items in a photo, posterize photos to create artistic graphics, and create screens, graphics and animation for multimedia projects. New sections include using scans to decorate real objects, and scanning for the Web.
From ProjectCool.com, August 2000
We found this book about a year ago and have been recommending it ever since. It helps you see images in a new light and gets you out of the mode that "scanner equals photos."
from Ali Lister (www.jazztech.co.uk) of Nottinghamshire, UK, 23 July 1999
Raising scanning to an art form
Enthralling. That's a pretty strong word to use about a technical manual, but this is no ordinary book about scanning. Everything in here is an utter delight. The history and theory of scanning are clearly explained. Yes, it may well start with a scan, but it ends with rekindling your enthusiasm for computing and graphics in a very big way. If you read it with your system booted up and immerse yourself in the chapters, you can see why these guys are so passionate about their work. Wonderful value for money. Apart from revealing hundreds of ways to turn lacklustre clipart and other sources into money-making graphics, it doubles as a handy guide to the features and versatility of Photoshop. This is a tour de force from two very generous authors. Arriving in the same package as Lynda Weinman's excellent "designing web graphics.3", I can't remember when I was last so happy just reading. Thanks!
From Crimson Star
This book's sub-title says it all: "A Guide To Transforming Scanned Photos And Objects Into High Quality Art." Does this sound like what you want to do? If so, then this book is for you, maybe.
This is an intermediate-level book. You need to be a working artist, graphic designer or photographer in order to grasp and appreciate what the authors are talking about. I found this book very informative and stimulating. You might want to read Digital Graphic Design, by Ken Pender, first.
After you have read this book, you will finally appreciate that scanners are far more versatile and useful than most people realize. You will be able to apply techniques that would have been considered trade-secrets only a few years ago. You will be able to tackle just about any web-publishing or desktop-publishing project that requires graphics of any sort. You will probably have so much fun, you won't go back to your real job!
Copyright 1999 Crimson Star
from Jim Moran, WebReviewer, Chicago, 14 March 1999
Scan For Fun, Profit, And To Expand Your Creative Abilities!
A number of computer data input devices have come on the scene in recent years to allow computer users to import a variety of data into computer graphics applications. One such input device that has gained popularity for importing artwork for Website designing is the scanner. Janet Ashford and John Odam have teamed up to produce Start With A Scan to actively promote the use of scanners to create impressive artwork that can be used for a variety of purposes including Website design.
This book serves as an excellent guide for taking scanned images and converting them through the use of filtering and other image editing tools to create outstanding graphic images. Consider adding effective shadowing, extruding 2D scanned images into 3D images, combining images, adding coloring and patterns, cropping, and special edging effects, to name a few.
There are almost an endless number of ways that images can be creatively edited. These talented authors will show readers how they too can start with a simple scanned image and apply graphic image editing to achieve cool special effect results!
Besides offering an impressive array of options open to graphics artists to convert scanned images into wonderful works of art, Ashford and Odam also demonstrate just how easy it is to scan a variety of objects such as paper, fabrics, food items, flowers, toys, household items, office supplies, tools, photos, patterns, symbols, and yes, even my favorite Ramen noodles! Custom-made backgrounds, textures, and clip art are yours for the scanning! Consider the number of items you can scan and how they can be put to creative and productive use!
The large 8 1/2" by 11" format of this book makes for easy reading and viewing. Exceptional illustrations used throughout the book offers a breathtaking view of how someone can scan simple objects and turn them into useful Web graphics. This book is an essential reference guide highly recommended for serious Web graphics use by those who also want to have fun and expand their creative abilities. "To scan or not to scan" is a question now left up to you to decide!
from Steve Broesder (steveb@ols.net) from Lexington, NC, September 21, 1998
First rate idea book, if you have a scanner or Snappy. I have been working with graphics for 5 years. This is one of the most useful books I have found. "Start with a Scan" does exactly that. Then it goes the next level, what to do with it. From photos, to 3D objects, and even old black & white clip art, are used creatively by Janet Ashford and John Odam. I have at least 20 books I use regularly, but this is one of the best.
Web Developer's Journal Book Reviews
Reviewed by Charlie Morris, January 8, 1997
This fine book covers many aspects of computer graphic work. As the title implies, it begins with a discussion of scanners and how to use them, and moves on to step-by-step instructions on how to manipulate digital images.
Now of course anyone can slap a photo on a flatbed scanner, crop and resize it in Photoshop, add some text in PageMaker or Corel, and print 'er out. But there is much, much more that you can do to improve the quality of an image, or transform it into something completely different. The first step is to understand how your scanner works, and adjust the parameters to optimize the scan for your particular image. What resolution should you scan at? If you plan to convert a color photo to black-and-white, should you scan it in black-and-white, or should you scan in color and convert it later? Which file format is best for your purposes? This book should answer these questions for you.
Once you get your photo, drawing or whatever, into the digital universe, there are several things you can do to make it look better. Scratches or other imperfections can be removed, and the exposure and color balance can be adjusted. It's a simple matter to adjust the brightness or contrast of an image, but Photoshop and other image-manipulation programs provide more sophisticated tools. By using the Levels, Curves, and Gamma tools in Photoshop, you can often get better results than by simply adjusting brightness and contrast. Hue, saturation and color balance can be tweaked to improve the work of the photographer, or to create special effects.
Of course, improving or retouching an image is only the beginning of what can be done with today's powerful digital tools. There are a couple of different ways to remove a background, or other unwanted elements. A variety of textures and artistic effects can be applied to make a photo look like a pencil drawing, an engraving, or whatever. By combining a scanned image with other art or text elements, you can create almost anything you can imagine. Start with a Scan covers all the possibilities pretty thoroughly. They talk about Photoshop a lot, but the techniques covered are perfectly applicable to other image-editing packages as well.
Some of the chapters of this book are: Working with Scanners; Editing Scanned Images; Working with Artists' Techniques; Creating Textures and Backgrounds; Transforming Photos into Graphics; Scanning Real Objects; Creating 3D Illustrations; and Multimedia Projects (including a section on designing graphics for the Web. Each topic is well-covered with lots of examples and imaginative suggestions.
As a book of this type should, Start with a Scan contains many illustrations, including plenty of side-by-side comparisons of differently edited images. My one complaint about the book is that some of these photos are rather small, making it difficult to see the subtle differences that they are meant to illustrate. All in all, though, I found Start with a Scan to be a very informative and well-written book, and I highly recommend it.
All contents copyright Markland Communities, Inc., 1997 and all rights are reserved. No material may be reproduced electronically or in print without written permission from Markland Communities, Inc., Route 2, Box 80, Burbank, SD 57010.
From Jon Warren Lentz
This book is a welcome exception to the mountains of sometimes useful software manuals we all hate and love. It is beguiling, full of creative gems and procedural insights. The initial premise is, of course, "start with a scan." To paraphrase a typical manual start, this means: in the beginning there was a scan, and the scan was good, so proceed to pages 27-33. And when the scan is evil, see pages .....
But this book is mostly about creativity. When I spoke with John Odam in his Del Mar design office he explained that they wanted to make a book that was about the things you can DO with images and computers, rather than to produce another dazzling but dated, program-specific after-market manual.
While the concept seems obvious now, I believe it is revolutionary. It's as though we have all been focusing on the bow and the arrow and then Janet and John introduce this Zen idea of a target.
A scan is produced by a scanner which creates a digital file from a photograph or drawing for use in printing, multimedia, or on the Internet. Nearly all digital imagery is derived, at least in part, from the source material of a scan.
Previously, what was done (and what could be done) with a scan was described in the software manuals and after-market books tethered to one of the three or four primary image manipulation programs ("Photoshop", "Painter", "Live Picture", "CorelDraw"). But this has always been "art" as a subfunction of how-to-drive-the-program.
It is refreshing to find a book that is not program specific and that has a longer shelf life than the program it elucidates.
This book's premise and tone (note how readable and non-technical) is exampled in the introduction to a chapter titled "Applying Artists' Techniques": "A scanner is a machine, and as such might be antithetical to the values of hand drawing, especially the irregular, warm line produced by actually dragging a pencil across a piece of paper. But by working back and forth between scanner and hand drawing, it's possible to conserve the special thick-and-thin line quality of traditional work, while still taking advantage of the powerful production features of computer graphics--for example, the ability to quickly add smooth color or color gradations. Used as one of several artist's tools, a scanner can be an aid at every step of the drawing process."
With words and pictures, Ashford and Odam build a chapter explaining this and other drawing processes. Luckily there are 13 chapters filled with more seeds for a garden of visual ideas.
This book is beautifully produced, with numerous color step-by-step examples, it is a magical entree into the means of thinking creatively with computer graphics. This book will be required text for my intermediate "Photoshop" classes.
--Lentz is a freelance artist working with cameras and computers in Carlsbad, CA. His internet domain is http://www.uncom.com. All rights reserved 1996,1997. Parts of These Columns First Appeared In My Bi-Monthly Column, "Pics, Clicks & Bits" In The COMPUTERLINK Section of The SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
ALL Words, Text, Graphics, Images, Etc., COPYRIGHT 1996, 1997, 1998
from Russell Brown, Senior Creative Director, Adobe Systems, Inc.
This book has more design candy to steal than the five and dime store. I give it 5 stars out of a possible 4.
from Linnea Dayton, co-author of The Photoshop Wow Book
A delight . . . an education in graphic design . . . scores of inspirations.
from John McWade, Before & After magazine
Start with a Scan thinks it's about scanning, but actually it's about creativity. You'll learn about gamma and saturation and tonal curves, all right, but what John and Janet have really assembled is more interesting than that. Here you'll find stuff to do . . . dozens of innovative,eye-pleasing projects . . . things you'd have never thought of . . . that will expand your design horizons overnight. How to draw when you can't. How to create boardroom-quality design from scraps. Shadows, textures, wiggly lines; how to get ten useful looks from one piece of art. And on and on. Start with a Scan is a workbook, which means you must meet it halfway. But it will meet you back. If you want to be a better designer today than you were yesterday, Start with a Scan is a fine place to start.
from MicrotekUSA Corporation, Recommended Reading list
Start with a Scan [first edition] is a veritable how-to book on the many creative wonders you can achieve with your scanner. Chapter titles give you some idea of the comprehensiveness of this book: Editing scanned images; working with printed clip art; working with scanned photos; transforming photos into graphics; scanning real objects; multimedia projects; and more. Lavish color illustrations throughout; friendly conversational tone; lots of wonderful projects you can work on. A great book!
