How to Scan a Book With a Digital Camera

Step-by-Step Guide

1. 1

   Step 1: Prepare: Put the book on a white surface - like a piece of art paper - with lots of overhead lighting.

   Make sure you don't cast a shadow on the book.
   
   Wear nylon gloves that blend in with the background.
   
   Make sure your work surface is low enough so that you can photograph directly over the book.
   
   Use a relatively high resolution on your camera, but make sure you set it to take jpeg, not RAW, images, to conserve file size.
2. 2

   Step 2: Shoot: Start from the first page

   Make sure every page is correctly focused, correctly exposed and includes all the text on the page.
   
   You may press down on the pages with to keep them properly aligned.
   
   Don't worry about your fingers being in the shot, as they will blend into the background. ,, To save file size and increase readability, you want to strip out as much extra color information as possible.
   
   You can automate this process:
   Start recording a new action.
   
   Then select Image>adjustments>threshold to convert to black and white
   - drag the cutoff slider to where it looks most readable.
   
   Save the images using File > Save for web and devices.
   
   Save in the gif format.
   
   You only need two colors, and you may safely crank up the lossy compression.
   
   Using this method you can compress six megapixel images down to under 200 kb, down from the roughly 2 mb original files. , Now that you have created your action, open Photoshop and select file > automate > batch.
   
   Select the action you just made, as well as the original images you want to work on.
   
   Then select a destination and numbering scheme.
   
   Run the process and you should end up with a number of compressed GIFs.
   
   Review your images again.
   
   If any of your images were underexposed or out of focus, they will be illegible. , There are a number of ways to do this, but the easiest is to use Mac OS X's automator.
   
   Simply drag your image set into the automator window, add a "New PDF from images" action, select a destination, and run the process.
   
   There you have it, a small, quick, and accurate digital reproduction of a book.
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   Step 3: take a photo

4. 4

   Step 4: turn the page

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   Step 5: repeat.

6. 6

   Step 6: Download: Download the images from your camera

7. 7

   Step 7: review them to make sure you didn't mess up anywhere.

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   Step 8: Create a processing action: Photoshop (any version) is a good software for processing

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   Step 9: but other software may work just as well.

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    Step 10: Create your pages.

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    Step 11: Convert to multipage pdf.

Detailed Guide

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