Photographing postcards

srichards

srichards

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Suz
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I've just had an annoying 30 minutes trying to even get a postcard straight enough so that within the viewfinder/liveview it actually looks straight. The camera is straight on. Dead centre of the postcard. I thought everything is perfect, but no, wonky!

How on earth do you get the damn thing straight enough or do you not bother and just correct in photoshop before rip your own arm off in frustration?

It doesn't help that my tripod is cheap and won't let me move it precisely enough which doesn't help at all. I can't mount the camera upside down with it and use it rostrum style either.

I have already tried scanning on a flatbed and the result was laughable. No detail from the postcard whatsoever. I've got an album full of ancient postcards and photos to digitise and it's not going well. :bang:

It should be a dead simple thing to do but it doesn't seem to be.
 
The scanner should be a better tool, but scanning takes some experimentation and processing in my experience.
 
I have already tried scanning on a flatbed and the result was laughable. No detail from the postcard whatsoever.
Click to expand...
what's the make and model - i would expect some good results from some of the cheapest all-in-1 scanners these days - I have two and have scanned a couple of postcards before all ok
 
etaf said:
what's the make and model - i would expect some good results from some of the cheapest all-in-1 scanners these days - I have two and have scanned a couple of postcards before all ok
Click to expand...

It's an epson perfection 3490. It's always scanned photos and other things fine. It's shiny white stuff it just can't seem to manage.
 
what resolution is the camera - just straighten in photoshop
what version of photoshop do you have -

easy with the ruler I think you can then just pick a line and auto rotate to horizontal
 
Last edited:
etaf said:
what resolution is the camera - just straighten in photoshop
what version of photoshop do you have -

easy with the ruler I think you can then just pick a line and auto rotate to horizontal
Click to expand...

Hopefully gimp will have something similar. I don't have photoshop itself any more.
 
Downloaded a newer epson driver and it works fine. Must have been a software error of some kind.

Yay. Saves me having to arse round with a tripod anyway :D
 
Shift + R gives you a rotate tool and you can move arbitrary
 
Vuescan is driving me nuts again. I use auto skew to straighten. Randomly it doesn't work or does it wrong! Tried several versions. Gone back to the March one which is slightly less unreliable. I've only ever used it for the odd scan before. Once you start doing tens a day you suddenly notice how unreliable it is.

Epson scan doesn't even load so I'm stuck with it.

Is there any other reliable scanning software for macs out there? I like the batch scan and saveable settings features of vuescan. It does do decent quality scans when it works.
 
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