Digital Photography Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 90 Fax from Your Digital Camera

When a fax machine isn't handy
but your digital camera is, you can still sign and return documents
as if by fax magic.

Paper isn't going away, though there are days when I wish it would. A
great example of such a time is when I receive a document in the mail
that requires my signature and an immediate return fax. The signature
part isn't usually a problem. But I often
don't have a fax machine available. Fortunately, I
always have my digital camera, which I can use to solve this problem.

Here's the basic procedure:

Sign the document.

Place it under an even light source and photograph it with a digital
camera.

Upload the picture to your computer and open it in Photoshop.

Crop the image to standard document size.

Save the file as a PDF.

Attach the file to an email, with instructions on how to open and
print it.

Once you get the hang of how to do this, your
"digital-camera faxes" can actually
look better than the output from half of the business fax machines
being used today. But there are a few tricks you'll
need to use along the way.

8.6.1 Photographing the Document

You want an accurate reproduction of the original
document. With this technique,
you'll be amazed at how good your
"fax" will look. Follow this
procedure to capture the image:

Place the document under an even light source, such as next to a
north-facing window or beneath a desk lamp.

Put your digital camera in Close Up or Macro mode (look for the
flower icon).

Adjust the white balance. If your camera has a
Custom White Balance setting that reads
the light and adjusts it accordingly, use that. Otherwise, use one of
the presets, such as the Light Bulb preset for tungsten
lighting.

If the document is printed on white paper, set your exposure
compensation to +1.

Increase your ISO setting to 200 to avoid camera shake.

Hold the camera over the document so that the plane of the camera is
parallel to the plane of the document. This helps eliminate
distortion.

Make sure that the document is as squared-up as possible on the LCD
monitor. Then take three or four shots of it.

8.6.2 Processing the Document

Now, you've essentially
scanned your document. Upload the
images to the computer, open them in Photoshop, and choose the
best-looking one. You'll first want to rotate the
image to make it vertical. Simply choose ImageRotate and
rotate the picture 90°. Next, you'll want
to crop it to document size [Hack #65] . You'll want
to set the width to 8 inches, the height to 10.5 inches, and the
resolution to 150 pixels/inch, as shown in Figure 8-14.

Figure 8-14. Cropping the digital-camera fax

If you have any nasty color casts you want to eliminate, open
Hue/Saturation and move the indicator on the Saturation bar all the
way to the left, where it reads -100. This essentially removes the
appearance of all color from the file. If you need to brighten the
image, you can do so by moving the indicator on the Lightness bar to
the right.

Once you have the appearance the way you want it, choose
FileSave As, give the document a descriptive name, and
choose Photoshop PDF from the Format drop-down menu, as shown in
Figure 8-15. Click OK.

Figure 8-15. Saving the document as a PDF file

You'll get a second dialog box, called PDF Options.
Click the JPEG button and set Quality to 10. This provides you with a
sharp-looking document and a small file size. The other option, ZIP,
is a tad crisper but at a substantial cost. In my testing, the ZIP
files were about 3.5 MB, while the high-quality JPEG files ran only
about 750 KB and looked almost as good as the ZIPs. Save the
bandwidth and go with the JPEG option.

Documents in Portable Document Format (.pdf) can be opened and printed on any computer platform. Plus, they rarely get corrupted when they're transferred by email.

8.6.3 Final Steps

All you have to do now is attach the file to an email and instruct
the recipient to open it. The document will look darn close to the
original. Figure 8-16 shows the final document with
the signature. I printed it on a regular inkjet printer and compared
it to the original. It holds up just fine.

Figure 8-16. The final digital-camera fax

Your digital-camera document is really no different from a regular
faxexcept, that is, that it might look better.