BAE Graphics

Printers, Copiers & Scanners

Printers

There are several B&W laser printers located throughout the building for faculty, staff and student use. Printing cost is a students responsibility however, in this department graduate students have access to a grad student laser printer and senior design students have a printer in the senior design room. Any BAE students may request printing when it involves administrative paperwork see a department secretary or student assistant.
The department also has a large fromat printer for poster printing see the Poster page about this printer.

• Secretary Office - Room 189 Weaver Lab Building
• Student Assistant Office - Room 110 Weaver Admin. Building
• BAE Graphics Room - Room 207 Weaver Admin. Building
• University Graphics Department business needs and Student - thesis printing

Copiers

The department has copiers located in the Administration and Lab buildings. The copiers are university owned and require the purchase of a copy card to operate. See the secretaries about obtaining a copy card or view the university Wolfcopy copy center web site. Learn about the Library Copy Service.

Scanners

Location

• Secretary Office - Room 189 Weaver Lab Building
• Student Assistant Office - Room 110 Weaver Admin. Building
• BAE Graphics Room - Room 207 Weaver Admin. Building

Scanning Basics

What is a scanner? A scanner is an image capturing device that can be attached to your computer today via USB connection. There are a number of different kinds of scanners:

• Flat Bed (most common pictured in headline)
• Hand held (generally used to scan small flat items very portable)
• Slide scanners (scans slides and negatives-recapturing images)
• Drum scanner (very expensive used mostly by industry/publishers)

Flat Beds are by far the most common scanner in use. These scanners come with scanning software you install on your machine to acquire and image. Depending on the scanner manufacturer each scanner comes with its own scanning software program. Like all software packages some are better than others. Additionally, scanning software can operate independently or it can interface with other programs on your computer so you can acquire directly into popular image editing programs like Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, Photo Paint etc. With some scanning software you can only make basic image decisions but, in image editing programs like Photoshop, Fireworks ect. you can make major changes to acquired images.

What can be scanned?

When you scan you are making a picture image of whatever is placed on the window of the scanners' surface. These days you can scan just about anything. Some of the common things scanned using a flat bed scanner are: photos, drawings, other printed materials, maps, charts, slides (some of the newest scanners come with a slide scan device)

In what formats can I save my acquired image?

Images can be saved for the web as gif, jpg, and png files and for print as tiff, bmp, DFX(auto cad) and many more file formats which are used often by graphic professionals.

tiff ---look generally good everywhere (except the web) and open up in most programs, They have very large file sizes. They are big because the most information is scanned and saved (stored) with a tiff file. Since, tiffs are information heavy files you could consider them the mother of all picture formats. A tiff can be converted into any other picture format but not so in the reverse, example: You can change a tiff file to a jpg file and you get great quality however, you can't change a jpg file to a tiff file without most of the picture information lost.

Tiffs are ideal for 4 color press reproduction and use CYMK color needed for press production or for slide transparencies. When quality counts a tiff file is best. You will lose clarity if you enlarge a tiff file greater than itself. however, tiff files can also be saved as eps files (a Vector graphic format) often used in graphic production since you can enlarge and re-size it on the page and keep the quality. (Encapsulated PostScript. It is a file format used to transfer a graphic image between applications and platforms. EPS files contain PostScript code in ASCII text.)

bmp ----they are like a tif file only contain a little less graphic information. This is a good choice for Word documents and white papers.

jpg ---are good for photographs or artwork that includes shading or blending and are used often for the web, for on-screen slide shows and for slide presentations. If used on the web they should be sized to a small file size. NOTE: if you resize a jpg file too often it will loose quality with each recompression and degrade the original quality of the photo. JPG files are saved in RGB mode. NOTE: Recent Improvements to digital camera resolutions has also improved the versatility of the jpg file format. With new camera resolutions jpg files can be saved in small, medium and large file formats and converted to CYMK color for print use.

png ---is a popular format for the web and designers like working with these files in Microsoft Fireworks and Dreamweaver. Nice features of png files are making a alpha transparency and Photoshop-like working file are saved with the png.

gif ---files are your smallest file size that reproduce well on screen, Use a gif file for web line art work charts, clip art and greyscale photos. Gif files are index mode files. Gif's files create small file sizes so don't try to use a gif file bigger than what it was originally scanned in at because it will be of very poor quality.

What is Greyscale? - This means the color has been removed from the photo or drawing and only the grey values are left. Any photo or art can be made into a greyscale image by changing it to greyscale mode.

How do you use a flat bed scanner?

1. Place an image of the item you want on the window of the scanner keep items straight, use the window edges to line things up against. How you place it on the window is how you get it.
2. Open the Scanning software. A basic scan software dialog box looks like this:
3. Go to menu file/acquire the scanner will start to light up and scan over your image then, the image will appear in the small window area of the scan dialog box it may be unclear and not look like the quality of the final scan.
4. Choose what it is you are scanning the most common choices are:
5. Line art--- B&W (with no shades of gray)
   B&W photo ---(anything in B&W with shades of gray in it, this could be a photo or drawing (art with gray areas)
   Millions of colors ---(anything with color in it photo or drawing) Then with the cursor draw a rectangle around exactly what on the page you want to scan (you can scan a portion of the picture or the entire picture).
6. The path should be established once during instillation and not need to be changed each use just leave this alone.
7. Adjust the brightness and contrast with the sliding scale or better yet there are often options to automatically adjust the image the scanner interface above the yin/yang button between the brightness and contrast will adjust it.
8. Optional: you can adjust the size of the picture to make the file smaller but, remember when you make it smaller you loose flexibility in scaling the image in the future. This means that when you go to place the picture in a document and you want it to be bigger than the size you scan it in at originally, you will then loose quality. The best quality picture is scanned in full size and use on the page half as small. For the most part if you don't need to save bites leave this alone.
9. Finally go to menu file/save and save the image choosing the format you need. If you are not sure what format will be needed in the future make it a tiff file. From a tiff file you can use any imaging software and create any other format you will need without compromising the quality of the picture. This is not so for any other file format.

How do I get slides scanned?

If you have a lot of slides it is best to use a photo service and get your slides scanned using a batch slide scanner. A batch slide scanners can scan 50 or so slides at a time. If you have fewer than 50 slides the BAE graphics room has slide scanners for use.

What is OCR Scanning?

You can capture any kind of typed printed copy and turn it into editable copy with OCR Scanning. Many of the new scanners have software which includes this capability. When you OCR scan you select the paragraphs to be scanned then, scan, spell check and save the text in ASCII raw format. You then use notepad to open the ASCII plain text and copy it into any text editing program ( MS Word, Word Perfect, Pagemaker, Quark, PowerPoint etc.). You can create editable text from any paper copy of clear typewriter text, computer text, book text, brochure text, etc. It saves on retyping time in many cases. If the copy is in bad condition (page blotches, broken lettering,r faint lettering) don't OCR scan it you will spend more time fixing the corrections choose to retype the copy.

Blueprint scanning (not reprints or copies)

Scanning for the purpose of having an electronic copy of a blueprint can be done but not in-house. A suggested local vendor for this service would be Duncan-Parnell (see service providers page) they have pick-up and delivery service. If you need to make copies or reprints most rapid-repro printers can do this.

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