Flatbed still life?

You bet! With a flatbed scanner at your desk and a little photoshop skill, you can make illustrations on the fly.

As a camera, scanners have about a half-inch of depth of field. Beyond that drops out of focus, which often is a good effect. The quality of light is also soft and luminous.

This article assumes that you have some Photoshop skills and are able to work in layers. Here are a couple examples:

The string of Christmas lights were plugged in and carefully arranged on the scanner. A dark background, someone suggested black velvet, was placed on top and the image was scanned.

The image was pasted into a new layer in Photoshop and the dark background was erased. The image also needed some retouching because of some flair from the Christmas lights.

That layer was duplicated. The cutout image filled with black, and a gaussian blur was applied. The shadow effect is the achieved by dragging the layer down and off to one side and the opacity was set to about 25%.

All this was laid over a high-res tiff of our nameplate (as another Photoshop layer).

This one may seem a bit complex, but the same techniques apply even to throwing a simple object onto your page as a graphic element.

 

To illustrate this story a postal sticker was crumpled and scanned on the flatbed scanner.

The image was cut out, a shadow added and the cancelled text was carefully overlayed.

A very soft blend was also added, in the bottom layer of the photoshop document, to tie the whole package together.

Fresh cut roses were scanned on the flatbed using a white background to capture the natural soft shadow.

Money was also scanned and overlayed onto the leaves of the roses.

Instead of sending a photographer out to take the typical fall leaves, we brought the leaves into the newsroom. These were scanned one at a time and assembles in Photoshop.

More examples to follow - Tim Frank