How do I light slightly glossy pages (e.g. art books, book covers) ?

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ArtBookCollector24
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Joined: 08 Dec 2022, 20:24
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Country: USA

How do I light slightly glossy pages (e.g. art books, book covers) ?

Post by ArtBookCollector24 »

Hi, I'm planning to get the Canon EOS M200 to scan art books with as much quality as a glass flatbed scanner would at 300dpi.

I'm guessing the built-in flash on the Canon EOS M200 will result in white reflection spots since the art book pages are more reflective than regular paper.

So I'm looking for suggestions on what type of light to buy that will lit my art book pages well but not cause white reflection spots.
And would also love advice on how to position/setup the light and camera! (this is my first camera purchase)
dpc
Posts: 379
Joined: 01 Apr 2011, 18:05
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Location: Issaquah, WA

Re: How do I light slightly glossy pages (e.g. art books, book covers) ?

Post by dpc »

Single camera? Use a copy stand. Place a piece of plate glass over the page to keep it flat. Position lights off to each side of the page (L/R), pointed downward at the page. The farther away you can position the lights from the page, the more even the lighting will be across the page (or do it outside in the sun). If this results in dark images, you can increase the time the shutter is open to capture more light since the page won't be moving while the shutter is open. You may want to use a 1 sec. shutter timer if you're pressing the shutter button manually.

Position the camera directly above the page, pointing straight down. You can use a mirror in the place of the magazine page to check if the camera direction vector is orthogonal to the page plane. You can use a sheet of black construction paper under the plate glass to check for reflections that will show up in your images. If the lights are showing up as reflections on the glass, you can either move the lights farther away from the page to the side or position the camera farther above the page.

Be mindful of lens distortion near the outer edges of your images (pincushion/barrel distortion). This can usually be mitigated by changing the camera position and adjusting the zoom factor. You probably want to do this before playing around with light positions.

I don't know how much you care about color reproduction, but you might want to invest in a color card and photograph that before you photograph the colored pages in a book. This will allow you to apply color correction in a post-process step. You can also post-process images to even out the lighting. When your lights are hitting the page at an angle from the side, the outer edges of the page are closer to the light source and will be brighter than the gutter. If you keep the camera/lights/page positional relationship the same during your photo session, you can photograph a single solid white page and then use the image intensity values of this "reference image" to correct the lighting across the page in your images.

Honestly, if I were tasked with acquiring images of glossy colored pages, I'd use a flatbed scanner if at all possible. Even if I couldn't use it on the books' pages, I'd use it for the covers, then resort to the camera/copy stand for the page content. A flatbed scanner is cheap compared to a camera/copy stand/lights and is far faster/easier to operate.

Good luck!
ArtBookCollector24
Posts: 2
Joined: 08 Dec 2022, 20:24
E-book readers owned: Kindle
Number of books owned: 40
Country: USA

Re: How do I light slightly glossy pages (e.g. art books, book covers) ?

Post by ArtBookCollector24 »

Thanks a lot for the info! I just googled copy stands and they are indeed very expensive and the baseboards are also not big enough to fit both pages of a medium sized artbook (each page is 8.5x12 inches). I found this overhead desk clamp mount that looks ideal, do you think it would work well? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B094N6W6SP

Regarding using a glass, I was planning to hold the book open and press the pages down with my thumbs and then find a software that could remove my fingers from the page edges. Would that give me a result that's as good as the glass plate method? I was hoping to avoid lifting and re-placing a large piece of glass for every shot.

For the lights, I found this set of 2 which I plan to put on the right and left side of the book as you suggested. I think they should do right?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09FLXD9PT/

Thanks for all the tips on distortion and lighting/color correction. I'm gonna have to look more into that. Do you use Adobe Lightroom to apply all those post-process corrections?

Lastly, I'm a bit confused as to why you mention that a flatbed scanner is faster. Even without taking into account that I'm taking photos of 2 pages at a time with a camera compared to scanning a single page, I would imagine that the scanner takes about 4-5 seconds per page at least while a camera can take a photo in 1 second or less, or doesn't it? There are often artworks that span both pages in my books so I was hoping to save time with a camera by not having to stitch together 2 separate pages if I used a scanner.
dpc
Posts: 379
Joined: 01 Apr 2011, 18:05
Number of books owned: 0
Location: Issaquah, WA

Re: How do I light slightly glossy pages (e.g. art books, book covers) ?

Post by dpc »

The stands and lights look OK to me. You may have to hit some of the stand hardware with flat black paint to prevent a reflection showing up in images of pages that contain a lot of dark content (or reflect off of a glass plate if you end up using that).

You can certainly do the thumb-spreading method if you don't care about capturing the page content under your thumb. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of software that removes thumbs from photographs so I can't recommend something for this. If you were scanning books containing mainly text, the margins are usually cropped anyway and replaced with white rectangular fills (ScanTailor does this). Ideally whatever you find to do this, will be capable of doing it automatically with no user intervention required and will replace the thumb area with interpolated color values from the surrounding margin area to make a smooth blend instead of simply replacing all the thumb area with a single color. I say this because your lighting will likely be slightly uneven across the page and the color values may vary under your thumbs. You may want to look for that software now and play around with it a bit before deciding that you don't need glass to flatten pages.

I actually developed all of the software that I use to acquire images from the cameras and to do post-processing. It was designed to work in the background processing images as they are generated by the dual DSLR cameras so that soon after photographing the final pages, the processed images are combined into a PDF. The goal is to not require any user intervention in the entire images-to-PDF process. I'm not there yet, but it's close.

I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with the capabilities of Adobe Lightroom, so I can't help you there. I don't know if it's actually LightRoom, but Adobe does have some software that apparently takes the image from a color card and can use those pixel values to color-correct other images. That software is reportedly included with some of the color cards you can buy off Amazon. I would be surprised if PhotoShop couldn't also do this.

Regarding the efficiency of using a flatbed scanner compared to photographing pages with a camera, I was referring to the entire process that includes setup of stands, lights, cameras, triggers, power supplies and assorted cabling, etc., plus the additional work needed on the post-processing side with a photographed image compared to the quality of image from a scanner. You add all of that up and you might find that the scanner comes out ahead, especially if you can use the images from the scanner as-is and require minimal hand-holding during post-processing.

Hope that helps!
cday
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Re: How do I light slightly glossy pages (e.g. art books, book covers) ?

Post by cday »

dpc wrote: 12 Dec 2022, 15:06 Regarding the efficiency of using a flatbed scanner compared to photographing pages with a camera, I was referring to the entire process that includes setup of stands, lights, cameras, triggers, power supplies and assorted cabling, etc., plus the additional work needed on the post-processing side with a photographed image compared to the quality of image from a scanner. You add all of that up and you might find that the scanner comes out ahead, especially if you can use the images from the scanner as-is and require minimal hand-holding during post-processing.
A flatbed scanner can certainly be expected to produce better quality initial images, and would avoid the 'finger removal' step, but will never be able to scan into the gutter of an open book the way a well-designed 'V- scanner' could. A reasonably inexpensive flatbed would also I think take rather longer than indicated to scan a page at good resolution. There are, though, a few scanners specifically designed for book scanning, which should be able to capture further into the gutter provided the book binding allows it to be opened past 90°.

But if as you say you need to scan double-page spreads, on a flatbed the results would necessarily be compromised by the gutter issue, and for the book size you mention you would need an A3 scanner. That could be quite a bit more expensive but at least also probably somewhat faster. When I had a magazine scanning project ten years ago I found a little used Epson GT-15000 A3 scanner on eBay and bought it: it was reasonably fast and although a discontinued model even then, when I checked recently I was surprised to find that it is still supported in Windows 10 and 11, Mac and Linux (in Linux rather than use the very basic Epson driver use a SANE application). If you use eBay you might take a look, and might possibly be able to resell it after use.
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