When taking part in events such as World Anthotype Day or World Cyanotype Day it’s important your digital entry is a representation of the print. Not everyone owns a scanner, so Dennis Humhprey shows you how to digitize your print using a cellular phone.
Once you’ve created your anthotype print, you’ll want to make a digital copy of it. You can always use a scanner to obtain your digital image, but what if you don’t have a scanner? I’ll show you how to photograph/scan your print using an iPhone or iPad and an app such as PhotoScan (Just a disclaimer: We are not partners with PhotoScan or get any benefit from recommending them. There are similar apps available for the Android OS). This will give a much better result than simply taking a photo of your anthotype with your smartphone.
Once you’ve downloaded the app, follow these 4 steps:
1Take a photo of your print.
Open PhotoScan and take a photo of your print using the scan application; make sure you photograph the full print with a bit of space all around the outer edges. You’ll see four movable corners surrounding the image of your print. At this stage, your scanned image may be slanted and not squared up.
2Align your image correctly
With your finger, use the cropping tool to drag/align each corner of the image in order to correctly enclose all sides of the image.
3Save the image
Click Done and your image will be displayed fully cropped and squared up. Save this image to Photos as a jpeg.
4Match the print
In the Photos app or a graphics program, open that image and adjust/tweak the brightness and contrast settings to better match those of the actual anthotype print. Save your final digital image.
Have fun obtaining a truer digital image of your anthotype print to share with others.