Scanning Magazines
 

I'm scanning some magazines (I have permission to scan them by the copyright holder) at 300 dpi (TIF's), but when I use them in FCP and zoom in or try to do any sort of motion on them they look pretty bad. I scanned some original 4x6 photos (probably printed at Walgreen's back in the day) the same way and they look great, it's just the magazines scans that are giving me trouble (including moiré patterns).

Any tips on scanning mags?

It could be the dot patterns in the printing that are causing the problem. You could try softening the image slightly or use different scan setting.

Oliver, if you can attach a screen capture of the image degradation issue I will probably be able to tell you what it is. Really need to be able to see what you are talking about.

Andrew

(attached to this post for easy reference)

What you are seeing here is the rosette screening of the cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks that combine on the printing press to simulate full colour reproduction . Those small dots are imperceptible to the eye until you make an enlargement.

About the only thing you can do to you scan is to apply a small amount of gaussian blur in Photoshop (or other image editing app) to blur this out. Be sure to only give it only just enough blur as the trade-off is a loss of detail in the image.

Failing that, the only other solution is to scan directly from an original photograph.

Andrew