After a gazillion years, my scanner is finally working!!!! Can you see me jumping for joy?! I bought one of those all-in-one printer/scanner/copier machines a while back, but it wasn’t compatible with the new version of Mac OSX. When I upgraded my iMac earlier this year to the new one, my Epson ME340 was absolutely useless. There was no available driver, and I couldn’t make it work, not even after I called Epson customer support several times. I almost threw it away in frustration, but my extremely rational and practical hubby said I should just wait. So wait I did.
I had no way to scan my watercolor illustrations though, so I’ve been relying on photographs of my painted work for the past several months. It is possible to use a camera instead of a scanner to digitize your work. It’s actually way more convenient because you don’t have to be connected to the computer all the time. However, there’s a certain amount of difficulty involved, particularly in getting the camera and image precisely aligned (to avoid distortion, cutting out part of the image, and out-of-focus areas). You also need to avoid color casts and shadows by controlling your lighting.
In the same way, scanning doesn’t always guarantee a perfect image capture. I had to experiment with the settings several times before I found the one I was most satisfied with. I normally paint on heavily textured paper, so it’s quite a challenge getting the texture not to show without affecting the colors of the image.
Here are pictures of some of the stuff I’ve been working on lately, all taken by my iPhone 5s. You can be sure I’ll be posting more properly-scanned images from now on!
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