This scan of Billy Williams' card from 1989 Sportflics has always bothered me. Its from the subset called "Best of the '60s". There are pictures of three players on it, Billy Williams, Al Kaline, and Tony Oliva. The picture changes depending on the angle that you're using to look at it, which is Sportflics' gimmick. When I put the card on the scanner bed, the angle gives you the Oliva picture.
It is not acceptable for this Cubs collector to have a Twins player show up like that. But I've never been able to do anything with the scanner to get the Billy image.
Recently I started playing around with my camera instead of using the scanner. With the camera you have the ability to adjust the angle at which the picture is taken.
I can get the picture of Billy to show up, but then the card looks skewed, and that won't do either. That means I have to add another step to the process and use the perspective tool in Photoshop (actually, I use GIMP, the free open-source Photoshop alternative).
And now I have Billy instead of Tony Olivia!
Nice job. I feel like my scanner is even worse when working with Sportflics. Instead of focusing on one image, it usually captures a combination of two. I have used your strategy... but it's way too time consuming when there are several cards to scan... or if you're trying to break down one card into its three images.
ReplyDeleteMy scanner went kaput years ago so since then all my posts have had camera-taken images. I've had to angle the shot to remove glare many times, so maybe I'll have to look into those new-fangled tools.
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