Ah, but you see, the scanners DID do the work. They DO put time and effort into it. Let's just take a basic scan, shall we? From my own perspective.
Well, one magazine page doesn't cost all that much. So, I'll willingly eliminate the annual cost for the web site to host the scan and the time it took to design the website. And the cost of the programs used to design the website. Which can equal quite a bit per hour, especially if you paid a web designer to create the same site for you. the design, the layout, the actual peicing together, the test runs, fixing bugs... etc.
But we're just talking about one page. Well, ok. I recently did a scan from Marie Claire of Ana Beatriz. So we'll use that one, for starters.
Got it at the grocery store. It's not bid upon from ebay, so no shipping costs are factored in, and it's not incredibly rare, so I did't have to compete with other people to get the magazine. So it only cost me about $3. Not bad.
So I place it in my $200 scanner... which is about a middle grade scanner, actually. And, because it's nice, it does a fairly nice job of scanning the image. Those with cheaper scanners? Not so lucky. Those with nicer ones have a much easier time than I do scanning this one page. But most people don't have scanners as nice as mine, and since I'm focusing on my own experience here, we'll stick to that.
Okay. So my Epson does a fairly decent job. It scans into - you guessed it - Photoshop. Photoshop runs the honest person around 600 bucks. With a new edition coming out, oh, now. So, forget upgrades. Ah, but your post wasn't about money. It was about work and time and effort.
Well, here's my scan, untouched and unfixed, at 6.25%.
Not bad.
Color needs some adjusting, but otherwise, good to go. Oh, but as we zoom in to 100%... oh, when we zoom in.
That, my friend, is what scanners loathsomely refer to as dust. Evil, horrible, plentiful dust. No matter how clean you get your scanner, there will ALWAYS be dust. There's dust in the air, dust on the paper, dust in the wipe you use to clean the glass - it is impossible to manually eliminate altogether. And sometimes there's wrinkles in the paper, or printing flaws that need to be fixed. But not in this one - aren't I lucky?
There is, however, dust. I'm going to tell you right now, every dust remover filter out there is CRAP for removing dust from scans. Complete. Crap. So, a decent scanner removes the dust by hand. Using the healing tool, a small brush size, and a good deal of concentration. It can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour and a half to remove dust, depending upon a) the condition of the scanner, b) the colors on the image |Dust shows up worse on black than on color| and c) the magazine page condition itself.
This scan took me.... oh.... bout 30 minutes. Not great, but not terrible.
So now we focus on the quality of the picture.
Sucks, doesn't it? All grainy and uneven. This is usually affected by the quality of paper, and frankly, unless it's a cover, if it's from your everyday cheap common magazine, quality of paper sucks.
ah, but to be fair, my scan does not stay this size. So, in order to be honest with this, I'm going to crop and shrink my scan to the size of my finished product. Which, by the way, I don't know at first, but since I've already done this one I have the luxery of knowing what the outcome will be.
My finished scan is 2100x2851. Decent scan size. So I'll just crop my original scan and resize it. Usually this is a 'guess until you find what looks best' process, done after fixing the colors and cleaning it up. Well, 2100 and 2816. Won't hold it against me, will you? Close enough.
Now, I'm going to compare the untouched up uncolor managed scan with the finished product. Same res, and almost the same size.
QUITE the difference.
How about zoomed out? at 50%?
Again, quite the difference. And oh, why not go all the way to 25%?
Yes, still quite the difference. Now, at 25%, the untouched scan doesn't looks -bad-. But compared with the finished scan... well, it doesn't quite compare at all.
But to get from the unfinished scan to the finished product, I usually start with color adjustments. To do this, and to do it well, you need a nice graphics program. Oh, look, here comes that $600 Photoshop program... but that's money! So it doesn't count. Well, learning how to use the tools in Photoshop that allow me to adjust the color and lighting and contrast, and to do it well, took... that's right! Time and effort. But since I didn't do this the very DAY I scanned this image, having learned it in the past, we won't count that either.
But regardless of my knowledge, it does take time. It's harder than it looks. There are about, oh... well, let me list them. Things I have to work with to adjust the color so that it is where I want it.
Levels. Those are fun.
Contrast. Slightly less fun.
Curves. So much fun.
Brightness/Contrast. The devil in a computer program.
and, on occasion
Color Balance.
And these don't work automatically. Not if you want them to look, y'know... good or anything. So you've got to sit and watch. Play with the options. This only took about 30 minutes for this image, but I've had to fiddle with these for, at my longest, two hours. And some scans just never look right. It would be wonderful, if you could use the same settings for these options each time and every scan you did would be perfect instantly. But God is not that kind, and life doesn't always present you with an easy option.
So, I've spent about an hour on this one scan already. Just clean up and color improvement. But what about the grain?
I'll go back to the image of both scans at 100% for you.
You'll see that both contain some amount of grain - which is my preference, really. I am not Duro, and while he does beautiful work, I prefer my scans to look like photographs instead of airbrushed paintings. That's my preference. Scanners tend to have their own way of doing things.
So... the grain removal. Using a series of filters at different levels, I can achieve this, depending upon the image itself, in anywhere from 5 minutes to three hours, for a particuarly BAD image. Some are just unfixable. Paper quality being the main factor on this, but also the way the image was printed onto the paper.
Marie Claire... not so good. This image inparticular.... not so good, especially on the skin. So.. and mind you, I know what I'm doing, this one took me approximately 40 minutes. I'm rounding a bit, and shaving off some time because I went and got myself a sandwich, and I don't eat in front of my computer. If we include that, it'd be about an hour and 15. but that's not fair, so we won't.
So it took me about an hour and 40 minutes to clean up this scan to my liking. A bit... much, really. but then, it's Marie Claire, not Vogue Italia, so there's more work involved. And as for effort, well... if I wanted to take the easy route, I would have just scanned it in, shrunk it down, saved and posted it.
So, after all that - not including money! - I'd say if I want to put a tiny little tag in a inconspicuous spot on the image -that CAN be easily removed if a person wants to, say, use the image for a wallpaper- to let people know that 'Hey, I scanned this', then I say it's my damned prerogative.
And you get to look at it, and hundreds of other scans I've done (not all as quality, as my old scans are their too), on the site which I designed and paid money to a place to host it and make absolutely no money on, at absolutely no cost to you.
So whether or not you think it's worth the time and effort for the scanners to do all that, if you're saying that it's not their work, and that they don't put time or effort in, you are sadly, sadly mistaken. And, also, completely wrong by a rather sizable margin.
(finished scan is on my scan site)
