Subject:
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lego element imaging
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.publish
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Date:
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Sun, 8 Nov 1998 04:44:20 GMT
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Viewed:
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2137 times
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Hi:
Just completely updated my website and got yet another
round of questions about how I got the images of all of the
Technic elements, hopefully my trial and error will benefit
someone else trying to do this.
There are two ways to obtain element images
a. A good camera/macro lens, proper lighting etc. This
is really just too much hassle and time. But if you do go
to the trouble of taking good phographs take the extra step
and have Kodak make you a photo CD. I have yet to see anyone
personally scan a print (or slide) that came even close to
what Kodak can do (I guess its a matter of a $300 flatbed vs
a $300,000 imaging processor).
b. Directly scan the element. The first I ever heard of this was
from Joe Lauher, who scanned images of a spacecraft to make a set
of instructions. Here is how I now scan elements:
The element is placed directly on my HP ScanJet 3C.
-To get a good final image the element must be eactly straight
so I I use a drafting triangle and a small holder made approprately
of Lego technic pieces.
-The scanner will cast a shadow across the elment, by placing the
piece upside down the final shadow will fall to the bottom. Just
be consistant.
-Note that as distance from the copyboard increases the sharpness
of the image decreases dramatically.
-Large elements will look bent at the edges due to parallax. I
leave it as an exercise to the reader how to best handle this, I
dont think you'll like my solution.
The image is twained directly into Photoshop via HP Deskscan
at 75dpi, 200% scaling and brightness/contrast values of 135.
The exposure values (brightness and contrast) should always be
the same (at least for the same color element).
-Choose a large enough image size so that you can accurately
edit, I have found that for most smaller pieces you need the image at
least 200% of original size, either scaled 200% or 2x the final dpi.
Experiment with different scaling and different resolutions to
see which gets the best results from your scanner.
Now the fun starts. Once in Photoshop the background, which
will be gray or black and typically has a wicked shadow,
must be removed. I use a combination of tools to remove the background.
-For straight segments obviously the eraser works fine.
-For straight angles draw an antialiased line in the new background color
then erase everything up to the pixel with the background color.
-For circles use the round marquee and cut.
-For round segments copy the entire layer then select the segment with the
round marquee, invert the selection and cut. In the background layer erase
the area behind the segment and a pretty good rounded segment will be left.
-Avoid the magic wand if at all possible.
-Rotate the element in only 90 deg increments.
-Avoid horizontal/vertical flips on any element that has writing.
Now you should have an element that is completely cut out of the old
ugly background and placed nicely on a new background. In my case
the background is always white but you could now easily cut the
background out for a transparent GIF or JPEG.
Once the image is seperated entirely from the old background and
placed on the new you can copy, cut paste and otherwise manipulate
the image to construct any other element of that type (e.g I only
scanned 1 or 2 of the Technic beams and the rest I just made up) or
add several parts of scanned elements into a new element
Scale the image to its final size. If you change the image size or
downsample the image use the unsharp mask to resharpen the
image.
-When resizing or downsampling try to choose new values evenly
divisable by the original size. (e.g. for a 150dpi image downsample
to 75dpi not say, 88dpi.
Save your image as a GIF or JPEG.
I am currently experimenting with backlighting transparent elements,
I'll let you know how it goes.
Jim
hughesj@one.net
http://w3.one.net/~hughesj/technica/technica.html
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