Streaming Companies Are The Landlords Of Media. You Will Rent In Perpetuity, And Never Actually Own Anything.

How do you go about getting such high quality scans of your art?

ok bear with me cuz this is going to be a lengthy post since I see a lot of people struggle with this and I think I could help by detailing my process.

before anything else I have to remark, this whole process only works with paper, loose canvas and any other media that can at least bend and warp a little in order to properly fit into a flatbed scanner, if you're working on on hard/non-maleable surfaces like wood pannel or mounted canvas, I recommend these tutorials:

Now, the first step is the most crucial: USE A GOOD QUALITY SCANNER! a scanner that's capable of obtaining photographic quality images is crucial, as there's no amount of editing that can salvage an image that has been overexposed, burnt, and artifacted to hell and back, here's an example: on the left, a scan of one of my paintings taken on the scanner of a cheap all-in-one printer. on the right, the same painting, scanned on a dedicated HP Scanjet G4050 flatbed scanner, which is the scanner that I still use to this day.

The difference might seem minimal at first, but when you start getting up close, the differences become REALLY apparent, not only are the colors washed out and muddy on the all-in-one scanner; there's some heavy artifacting on its scan as well as random blurry spots that makes the image look much worse, and the overexposure has completely killed the paper grain which is much more visible on the flatbed scan.

it's worth pointing out that both images you see here are what they looked like /AFTER/ adjustments and corrections in photoshop; the first one, as bad as it looks, took me several hours to of tweaking to get to that point, while the latter took me about 10 minutes of saturation adjustments to make it look as close as possible to the original painting. the reasons for this stark difference in quality are very simple: all-in-one printer-scanners ARE NOT made for scanning art, they're made for scanning documents, so the quality needed for that is much lower than the one needed for a painting or a photograph, so what you need instead is a dedicated, photographic quality flatbed scanner. One that I could recommend, not from personal experience but from recommendation from my peers, is the Epson Perfection V550/V600 Photo Scanner, BUT I don't want you to think from this that you NEED to shell out the big bucks into the most expensive and latest equipment in order to be able to get decent scans of your art, the previously mentioned scanner that I used is a lower-mid range device and is almost 10 years old, so if you ask me, it is perfectly acceptable to buy a pre-owned, used, refurbished photo scanner, as long as it's in decent shape and works as intended, you will be able to get what you need out of it. (***EDIT*** Another tumblr user with experience in professional media scanning has pointed out that while these scanner models are great and very advanced, they are very expensive and most of that pricetag is related to photographic scanning features that are not useful for anything that isn't photo negatives or digitizing of documents, their suggested model instead is the Epson Perfection V19, because "it's running the same photo scanning firmware as the higher-end models, has the same bit depth and still scans up to 4800 dpi. They run ~$70 brand new, even cheaper if you find them on sale or used.") Ok, I have the scanner, what now? the first and most important thing to consider when you're going to scan your work is: SCAN AT THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE QUALITY THAT YOUR COMPUTER CAN HANDLE, most if not all scanners give you the option to select the dpi (dots per inch) measurements at which you want to scan. the standard for "decent" quality images is 300 dpi, but I personally find that extremely insufficient, yes, it will give you decent-ish images to post on social media, but if you want to do anything else with your images, like making high quality prints, posters, or high quality closeups of your work, those 300 dpi are going to fall really short and become extremely limiting. personally, I scan ALL my work at 1200 dpi, I could go higher than that all the way to 2400 but honestly, I've yet to find a use for an image size that big, at 1200 you already have enough quality to print a house-sized poster with a pretty decent looking final product, so unless you plan on hanging copies of your work to the side of the Empire State building or if you're trying to scan EXTREMELY small pieces, 1200 dpi should be enough, the file sized you're going to get out of 1200 are already almost ridiculous (yes, this image is over 1 GB in size)

Next, to address the elephant in the room: What do I do if my painting is bigger than the flatbed of the scanner? well, you're gonna have to learn to scan in parts like I do! the trick to scanning in parts is that every section you scan needs to cover a little more area than it should so that when you start stitching the individual scans together in your preferred image editing software, you can erase the sections warped by the edges of the scanner bed and cover them over with the extra area scanned in the other images, for example, here's a little chart I made on how I scan a medium sized painting in 4 parts:

make sure to NOT rotate the painting while scanning it, simply slide it across the bed to match your desired section, always with the top, bottom, left, and right pointing always to the same directions, if you start rotating the painting you run the risk of warping the whole scan, or warp it in less predictable ways, and it's gonna be a bit of a nightmare to stitch together. I also recommend to instead of closing the top of the scanner to make it flat against the scanner bed, keep it open and put a few books on top of the painting that are a 1 or 2 cm smaller than the scanner bed, the reason to do this is because closing the scanner cover and letting that flatten the painting, the fit between the top and the bed is so tight that you risk bending and damaging the paper/canvas when scanning, giving it some space at the edges when scanning lets the paper/canvas curl naturally with the material's own flexibility, so the risk of damage is much lower. if your painting is bigger than that, you will essentially follow the exact same process but just divide the painting into more scans, personally I've done up to 9 scans per a single painting on my biggest pieces, any more than that can get a little toooo complicated to stitch together, but not necessarily impossible, especially considering that a lot of image editing softwares nowadays have automated stitching functions, which CAN get over the edge warping on their own, but I've personally found that you'll still get better results if you can eliminate that warping and let the AI work with the best sections of the scans only. PERSONALLY I don't use the automated functions and prefer to do it completely by hand in Photoshop because I'm a neurotic perfectionist and I tend to zoom in into the paintings and notice every little microscopic smudging and bad overlap the AI does between the scans that 99% of people won't notice, but hey, that's just me, absolutely feel free to use the automated functions that the software gives, you don't need to be as extra as me! I think that about covers most of my process there, remember this is a process that might take a little practice so don't give up if your first scans don't look that great or look wonky when stitched together, you have plenty of room to finetune and adjust everything to your liking. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask and I'll try my best to answer. Also if you found this small tutorial useful, maybe drop me a tip or checkout my patreon and store to support me ;) ***edit*** noticed someone added a flashing imagery CW so I modified the gif so that it blinks slowly and it's hopefully less hard on the eyes!

if you search a tag on someone’s blog on the mobile app it will show you only a selection of posts in an inscrutably random order but if you go to a mobile browser and type [blog url].tumblr.com/tagged/[tag] you will get all posts on that blog with that tag in reverse chronological order. if you add /chrono behind it you get them in regular chronological order. naturally this works in desktop browsers too but i know many people are mobile only these days and the app’s built in tag search is shit so this knowledge is vital to your survival

hey look over there what's that *throws these at you*

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FAYDE (more accessible wiki of dialogue trees but without audio)

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

why is shopping for computer shit so difficult like what the hell is 40 cunt thread chip 3000 processor with 32 florps of borps and a z12 yummy biscuits graphics drive 400102XXDRZ like ok um will it run my programmes

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youtube is pulling this bullshit again

praying for the firefox gods to save me once more...

if anyone’s interested in asian cinema, esp southeast asian cinema, check out the asian film archive. you can even submit films for preservation/restoration (according to guidelines), so it’s a great resource for filmmakers, collectors, cinephiles of all stripes :3