"Thomas E. Eichhorst" wrote:

> Nancy,
>
> I have had really good luck in scanning shells and will gladly pass on what
> I have learned and what I was taught by Bill Frank of Jacksonville.
>
> First, I hope you have a good scanner.  I found the Visioneer to be great
> for scanning shells.  I use the 300 dpi setting for most of my work, unless
> the shell is really small, then I kick it up to 600 dpi and set an initial
> frame really pretty tight on the shell so I can blow it up and still have a
> good image.  If you leave the cover off you will pretty much get a black
> background.  It will have some flaws and light areas, unless you scan in the
> evening with the lights out.  Who watches that much TV anyway.
>
> Recently I scanned a lot of nerites and many were black -- kind of negating
> the use of a black background.  In this case I uses a piece of blue
> construction paper.  One piece cut and taped to form a circle about one inch
> high, then another to set on top of the circle (with the shell inside).  The
> trouble with this is you end up with a shadow.  This looks okay unless you
> combine two images (dorsal and ventral) and then the shadow may not quite
> fit properly.  What I did was put in an entirely new background with
> Paintshop Pro (a great program).  There are many other programs that will
> perform similarly but I really like this one.  There is no easy way to do
> this as the automatic fill functions almost always cut into the image.  I
> basically go around the image with a pen tool and put in the new color, then
> block out the large areas.
>
> I have scans I can send you that show some of this and would be happy to
> answer any questions.
>
> Tom

--
Marlo
Merritt Island, Florida
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