Scanning cloth.

[adrianxw]

I have a Canon 5000F scanner. My wife runs a small textile business and wants to put pictures of various types of cloth, (organic cotton/linen/silk), on her web site.

When I put a sample of cloth in the scanner, it looked really odd, with patterns of wavy lines over it that are not there when you look at it in real life.

I'm guessing this is some "beat" effect between the weave of the cloth and the x-y scanning of the machine. I can reduce the effect by rotating the cloth so that the scan lines and weave are less parallel, but the problem never really goes away.

Can anyone suggest a way of getting a decent .jpg of the cloth using just the scanner, (i.e. not going out and buying a digital camera).

[joshdick]

I know absolutely nothing on this subject, but the first thing that comes to mind to me is to try suspending the cloth above the surface of the scanner a bit, maybe an inch or two.

[RobR]

It's called a Moire pattern ( http://www.mathematik.com/Moire/ ) . Best way that I've found to fix it is to scan at maximum resolution, and then resize the image (you may need to experiment with how much by), which tends to reduce the effect greatly.

HTH.

[Salem]

Would a piece of lightly translucent plastic help to diffuse the detail, and perhaps therefore reduce the moire effect?
Just guessing here....