Scan a Book With a Digital Camera

This tutorial shows you how to digitally reproduce a book with a digital camera and a computer.

Steps

  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. Shoot: Start from the first page, take a photo, turn the page, repeat. 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.
  3. Download: Download the images from your camera, review them to make sure you didn't mess up anywhere.
  4. Create a processing action: Photoshop (any version) is a good software for processing, but other software may work just as well. 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.
  5. Create your pages. 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.
  6. Convert to multipage pdf. 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.

Tips

  • Use the smallest aperture permitted by your lighting to maximize depth of field. (This means the F-stop number should be something like 8, 16, or 22 rather than 2.8 or 4.5)
  • Try this with a tripod. It is easier to shoot than holding your camera, but make sure you have enough light if you do this!
  • Try this using your camera's tethered mode. On some cameras, this might not work because the file transfer rate is too slow.
  • Alternatively, try uploading the photos to [www.scanr.com], which will create a PDF file and embed the text in it.

Warnings

  • Make sure you shoot all of the pages with the same camera and lighting settings.
  • Be sure to get your camera settings right before photographing several hundred pages. Open your test images on the screen to make sure they're good enough. Try running the threshold adjustment on your test images.
  • Keep backups of every step in the process in case something goes wrong

Things You'll Need

  • Book
  • Camera
  • White workspace
  • Rubber glove
  • Digital Imaging Software: Photoshop recommended
  • PDF creation software: Mac os X's preview and automator recommended

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