Date   : Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:14:39 +0100
From   : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: 32016 + 32082

On 14/12/2011 18:51, John Kortink wrote:

> Replied to by email.

Hey, he's not the only one interested! :-)


My personal experience:

   1. Digital camera. Getting close enough to do justice to the board
      tends to involve some visual distortion (pincushioning). Ironically
      I've discovered the best method with my little (very non-pro)
      equipment is to place the camera further away and hold a large
      magnifying glass over the lens; but this induces shear if the mag.
      is not *exactly* level with the camera.

   2. Flatbed scanners are terrible. Their depth of focus means anything
      on the glass comes out looking lovely, when anything further away
      is blurry. Unfurtunately PCBs are 3D objects (esp. if you have heat
      sinks etc). Somebody mentioned LED scanners; in my (albeit limited)
      experience with a Canon USB flatbed and a Brother combo-printer,
      LED scanners are more prone to tight scan focus than, say, that old
      clunky parallel-port jobbie with fluorescent tube that I used to
      run off the RiscPC (yay David Pilling!).


Everybody will say it, I'll repeat for emphasis. LEARN how to use the 
camera's white balance. For food/cooking photos on my b.log, I learned 
very quickly that energy-saving bulbs can throw some extraordinary 
colours onto food. It is less visible with circuit boards, but even so 
the photos might come out a bit "cartoony" without balanced colours. It 
helps, of course, if you have some smart image editing software so in 
post-production you can click a pixel and say "it should be this colour" 
and have the software alter the colour balance accordingly.


It also goes without saying that if you do a multi-light setup, you must 
use the same sort of bulbs. Mixing (say, a halogen desk lamp with a 
small fluorescent) will just be... bad.


Don't be afraid to experiment; we're no longer paying for film 
development. :-) In *some* (albeit rare) cases, I find stepping down the 
shutter and running a longer exposure gives nicer results than the 
auto-metered, which seems pathologically hardwired to prefer 100asa even 
at times when it makes no damn sense. But beware pushing it too hard, as 
that's when dodgy pixels make their presence known, as anybody that's 
tried night photography with a domestic digital camera will no doubt 
have discovered [those blue and red flecks in the photo, thankfully 
fairly easy to touch out in post-prod].


Best wishes,

Rick.

-- 
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...