Visualizing Microbial Seascapes - Digitizing Zoetrope Strips
From Help Wiki
Scan the zoetrope strip
- Open Image Capture to scan the strips. Scanning - Mac
- 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. We recommend scanning at 150 ppi.
- 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”).
Editing in Photoshop
- In Photoshop, open the four images.
- 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.
- Select the crop tool and level and crop each of the four strip sections so they are the same height. Save.
- 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).
- 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”).
- 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.
- Close all the images.
- Follow instructions to make this sequence of images into an animated GIF. GIF from image sequence