With the advent of desktop publishing came the democratization of graphic design. Which means that these days, with the right equipment, just about anyone can produce graphically sophisticated documents--or clumsy ill-conceived messes. To make sure you end up with the former, you need this comprehensive guide! Realizing that many of today's desktop publishers come to the task with no formal design or graphics training, authors David Blatner, Glenn Fleishman, Steve Roth, and Conrad Chavez, detail both the theory and practice of producing top-notch scans and halftones. Through tips, techniques, step-by-step instructions, and real-world examples, you'll learn how to scan, sharpen, and output your images as well as how to correct color and tone. Throughout, the emphasis is on not just how to perform a given task but why it makes sense to do so in a certain way. Filled with sure-fire techniques and practical discussions of today's software and hardware, when it comes to halftones and scans, this guide covers it all!

Amazon.com Review
This highly useful, detailed guide helps desktop-publishing and other design professionals produce the best possible scans and halftones from their images. The first section focuses on scanning, first featuring explanations of such terms as spi (samples per inch), bit depth, optical and interpolated resolution, and dynamic range. The authors even advise you on buying and cleaning scanners. Next they detail the elements of good scans and how to fix less-than-perfect ones, helping you figure out what sort of file formats and resolutions to use in your work, how to do tonal and color corrections, and how to sharpen and compress images. Finally, the discussion turns to Web and printer output and to OCR technology and PhotoCD images.

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