Scanning line art

[Jake]

You should be scanning this stuff in at 600 DPI greyscale and then doing a little levels work. If it's truly just ink and nothing else, you may be able to get away with 1200 black and white, but you'll probably be annoyed.

I'd almost recommend doing them at 1200 dpi greyscale and then running a Photoshop threshold on them and dialing it around until you get the weights and contrast the way you want it. 1200 or 2400 dpi straight black and white will reproduce the most cleanly as "inked work" on paper, I think, unless you're going to be on an amazingly high DPI halftone press, which is unlikely.

[Ben X]

Ooh, I'll try CS2, thanks.

Jake - I don't have Photoshop and I'm trying to keep the filesize down...

[Ben X]

Gah, double-post.

[osmosisch]

Ooh, I'll try CS2, thanks.

Jake - I don't have Photoshop and I'm trying to keep the filesize down...

CS2 contains photoshop

[Ben X]

Thanks! I won't have proper internet for another week but then I'll grab it.

[toblix]

Didn't they not give away CS2 for free, but provide it as a download to existing customers because they were taking down the activation infrastructure?

[Ucantalas]

I just came here to mention that. Technically, its not free, but its provided for people who legitmately own the software. You can still download the actual files from Adobe with a free account, but you still need to enter the special serial key sent out to people who own the software.

...of course, if one were to search the internet, one might come across these serial keys...

[osmosisch]

There's a serial key on the Adobe download page itself. No shenanigans required. You do have to click through an agreement about being a photoshop owner, but that's more to cover their butts.

 

Adobe has a long history of encouraging piracy/free versions for low-budget people because those tend to be students, who then grow up, get jobs at companies and only know how to use Photoshop hence soft-locking a large part of the market into using their software. This move seems to me to be consistent with that strategy.

 

 

Adobe has disabled the activation server for CS2 products, including Acrobat 7, because of a technical issue. These products were released more than seven years ago, do not run on many modern operating systems, and are no longer supported.

Adobe strongly advises against running unsupported and outdated software. The serial numbers provided as a part of the download may only be used by customers who legitimately purchased CS2 or Acrobat 7 and need to maintain their current use of these products.

(it works fine)

[toblix]

In other words, this is software piracy.

 

edit: What I mean is that it's important to know that downloading CS2 from Adobe without actually having bought it is piracy; they're not giving it away for free.

[Ucantalas]

Wait, the serial numbers are in the downloads? I guess I should look more carefully.

[Ucantalas]

Oops. I only now noticed the extra column on the downloads page. I feel quite dumb right now.

[osmosisch]

If this is an ethical bridge too far, Paint.NET also has a fine levels tool:

http://www.getpaint.net/doc/latest/Levels.html

[Ben X]

Gahhh, ethically conflicted. I like that they've decided to make the old versions future-proof even though they've opened themselves up to pirates by doing it, so I don't really want to be one of those guys who takes advantage of that. On the other hand, it's not like I'll use it a lot or make any money out of it...

 

When I've got proper internet (am in the pub at the mo, get my flat hooked up on Tuesday hopefully), I'll scan in a bit of one of the pages and ask you kind folks to guide me through using the suggested free packages (GIMP, Paint.NET etc) to make my little project a lot easier. Surely they can do what osmosisch did in PS in 5 mins?

[osmosisch]

Paint.NET let me do this also in like 5 seconds:

 

 

(it's a <4 meg download by the way)

[Ben X]

Nice, thanks! I'll give that a go next week and let you guys know how it's going. Hopefully I'll be able to share some bits and pieces too.

I think my next set of questions will probably be about reducing the size if an image while retaining quality, for the stuff I've already done at silly sizes, but I'll leave that for a while!

[brkl]

For that, make the images 8-bit grayscale first, then scale them down with the cubic algorithm or something. If you scale them down in two colour mode they'll look bad.

[Ben X]

Ah ha, thanks, will try that. Don't know whether Paintshop or Paint will have all that, we'll see!