Hi,
I am creating a book in Aperture to re-construct an old scrapbook (as well as add new comments/editorial). The original physical scrapbook contains irregularly shaped newspaper clipping ('L' shaped images, etc). I have 2 questions about this.
Questions:
1. I intend to scan the images to .tiff or .jpeg for inclusion in the Aperture Book. Any suggestions on the best scan resolution for future printing of the book?
2. I have Book pages on which I would like to place images of these clippings. I have done a few tests, scanning a few sample, cleaning up the images in Pixelmator to delete areas of the scan which are not part of the original newspaper clippings. The result is irregular shaped images with transparent regions where there is no newspaper clipping. I have discovered that Aperture apparently does not handle these transparent background regions and fills with them with black.
I am looking for some suggestions on how to handle this?
In some of the black themes like Stock Book Black, this looks ok on the screen but I'm not certain if printing it will look ok? Will the black Aperture “fill” match the black on the Stock Book - Black theme?
If I want to use one of the other themes like Journal or Photo Essay which allows for maps is there any way to 'trick' Aperture to work with these transparent regions? Or to color match the page surrounding the region to make it flow with the rest of the book? Are the RGB, CMYK, or HSB values that are published for these themes that I could mimic in a photo editor and fill the transparent regions? Whould this work?
Thanks. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
- Andrew
System Info:
Macbook Pro, Lion 10.7.4, Aperture 3.3
Andrew,
I know what you mean about the transparency showing up as black. I assume you are saving out as PNG files? Try a few things; these are just ideas, as I’ve never done this myself.
1. Try making a TIF file with an alpha channel. So, go to Photoshop (or whatever you’re using; Pixelmator can do this I’m sure) and load the transparency as a selection, save that as an alpha channel, then flatten the file. See how Aperture reads it.
2. Export the file with transparency as a PDF and load the PDF into Aperture, see if that shows the transparency.
As far as resolution, I don’t do much book printing and to be honest I’ve never dug into it that deeply, but if you scan at 300dpi at the size you intend to print, that should be more than enough. The books are probably printed at 266.
@PhotoJoseph
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