Visualizing Microbial Seascapes - Digitizing Zoetrope Strips

1. Scan the zoetrope strip. If you are working from a 3” x 36” 12 frame strip, you’ll need to make 4 scans of three frames each to capture the entire strip. I recommend scanning at 150 ppi.
2. Save each scan as a .tif, a Tiff document, named appropriately and numbered in the correct order, 1-4 to a folder labeled with your name and the contents (for example “Jane_diatom zoetrope scans”).
3. In Photoshop, open the four images.
4. If you need to make image adjustments, do that now, making sure to do the same adjustments to all so the images are consistent across the whole sequence. For example, you may want to adjust Levels to enhance color saturation or decrease background smudges. Save.
5. Select the crop tool and level and crop each of the four strip sections so they are the same height. Save.
6. Select the marquee tool and set it for fixed size, 450 x 450 pixels if you have scanned at 150 ppi. If you scanned at a different ppi, set the marquee fixed to 3 x the ppi you scanned at).
7. Place the marquee over the first frame, line up the bottom left corner of the marquee tool with the bottom left corner of the frame. Copy it (Command C) and paste it (Command V) into a new Photoshop document. Save the new document as a .jpg file to a new folder labeled “frames” within the original folder. Give this first frame a file name that includes the number of the image (for example “diatom001.jpg”).
8. Repeat this action for all the frames in sequence, saving and labeling each new frame so you end up with images numbered from 001 to 012 in the new folder.
9. Close all the images.
10. Follow instructions to make this sequence of images into an animated GIF.