Flatbed Scan Effect
Hand it a photograph of a thing and it comes back as a flatbed scan — no perspective at all, and everything lifted off the glass falling to black within a couple of centimetres. Two fields.
We made two examples, from two different photographs: cut poppies, and a handful of keys with a watch. One soft subject and one hard, both with parts that stand well clear of the glass.
You get a flat, orthographic record on a black ground: no perspective, no drop shadow, no reflections, and very fine detail wherever the object presses on the glass. Do not expect raised parts to fall away to black: the top of the poppy head and the watch case came back fully lit, even though the fields asked for them to disappear. Use it for the look of a scan, not to model the distance from the lamp.
Generated for this library
Input
On glass the leaves and the flat side of the stem
Standing the flower heads
Falls away by the top of the flower head there is
nothing left but black
Photograph poppies.png (1254 x 1254)
Returned 1 image · 1:1 · the poppies scanned
perspective none visible - the watch face is round,
the keys lie flat, nothing converges
falloff did not happen: the poppy heads and the
watch case stand off the glass and are
fully lit
detail very high where things press flat
ground black, with no shadow and no sweep
words none, in any scriptYou fill in 2 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1What is lying flat on the glass, and what is standing off it
- 2How quickly it falls away, said against something in the picture
Flatbed Scan Effect
What this makes
Hand it a photograph of a thing and it comes back as a flatbed scan — no perspective at all, and everything lifted off the glass falling to black within a couple of centimetres. Two fields.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Attach the photograph and paste the template in the same message.
- Replace the two FIELDS lines. Say which parts touch the glass; everything else is measured from them.
- Check for perspective. If any pair of parallel edges converges, the run photographed the object instead of scanning it.
- Check the background. It should be black. A white one means a studio shot with the levels pushed.
What you swap
- What is lying flat on the glass, and what is standing off it
- the leaves and the flat side of the stem are on the glass; the flower heads stand off it
- How quickly it falls away, said against something in the picture
- by the top of the flower head there is nothing left but black
Before it runs
- A photograph, attached to the message, of one thing rather than a scene. A scanner is a flat bed and a room does not fit on it.
- An object that can lie down. Something whose whole character is its height comes out as a small lit patch and a lot of black.
- Acceptance that you lose the sides. A scan sees straight down with no perspective at all, so a box shows its lid and nothing else.
- Nothing that needed a background. The area around the object is black, not white, because there is nothing there to bounce the light back.
When to reach for it
When an object should be presented as a specimen: a catalogue, a cover, a record of a collection, a botanical plate. Templates in this genre ask for a scanner aesthetic and hand back a studio photograph on a white background, which is the one thing a scanner cannot make.
What changes
- One photograph in, one flatbed scan out — the object recorded rather than photographed.
- No perspective anywhere: parallel edges stay parallel, and you see only what touches the glass.
- Anything lifted off the glass darkens fast and is gone within a couple of centimetres.
- Detail where the object presses flat is extraordinary, because the sensor is a few millimetres away.
- One image, no drop shadow, no reflection, no border.
Pairs with
- Infrared Film EffectHand it a photograph and it takes the picture again on infrared film — where anything alive and green glows white and a clear sky goes almost black, because chlorophyll is a mirror at a wavelength the eye cannot see. Two fields.
- Pinhole Camera EffectHand it a photograph and it takes the picture again through a pinhole — no lens, so nothing is ever truly sharp and nothing is ever more blurred than anything else, with the corners falling away because of simple geometry. Two fields.
- Wet Plate Collodion EffectHand it a photograph and it takes the picture again on a wet collodion plate — an emulsion blind to red and wide awake to blue, so lips go black, a sky goes blank white, and the whole look follows from that one fact. Two fields.