Large format scanning? (how to scan a map)

Hi Makers,

Does anyone have any tips or ideas about how to scan something large? I have a few old maps that I would like to scan.

The 1st map is a 1976 street map of Bulawayo Zimbabwe. It is 101cm x 80cm. Then there are some other (1950s) maps of Zimbabwe.

I have an A3 scanner at home but I would need to stitch all the images together after. Any thoughts much appreciated.

After it is scanned I can tweak the size and find a large format printer to print a few Christmas presents. Did the space get rid of their large format printer?

Here are a couple of photos of the map for all the cartophiles and Zimbos.

Giant thanks,

Peter.

I don’t have the answer but you could try asking Christian who makes Direction of Travel (his email address is on contact page) - it’s a newspaper of old airline maps so I’m sure he knows exactly what you should do. He’s London based which might be helpful if he’s using any specific equipment but I imagine it’s scanning, stitching and cleanup

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Hello Peter,

If you want to go ahead and scan in in sections, make sure you get the map to lie really flat on the scanner glass - maybe put a sheet of stiff card on top so the scanner hood has something flat to bear on. Or perhaps iron the map gently first, to minimise the folds and waviness? (On something flat, not the padded top of an ironing board…)

Stitching it together in Photoshop would be fairly straightforward - just a bit fiddly getting the sections square and managing the overlaps neatly. You might end up with a very large file. (Maps are touch easier than some items because there a few grid lines to use to line things up square.)

(A last resort might be to mount the map on something flat and just photograph it… you would need a fairly decent camera, then it would be a bit of task getting it absolutely square and rather tricky to get even lighting across the map. If you are planning to print the result out at anything like the original size, I don’t think this is viable. An old fashioned rail-mounted process camera might do it, but I don’t know anyone outside of large scale trade printing who has one with a digital back.)

‘Direction of Travel’ looks fascinating - thanks for the link James!

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@PeterF There is software that will do it automagically. Does photoshop not have that option?

If you don’t have too many, there are companies that do this: https://www.doculand.co.uk/scanning-services/large-format-document-scanning/ No idea of cost

palmada - re. Photoshop, good point… I don’t know. I haven’t had to do this very often (and not recently); I’ll look deeper when I get a moment. I have a fair bit of experience working with Photoshop, but for a fairly narrow range of uses.

In some ways those automatic image-stitching apps might work better with a set of flat scans than with photographs (where the individual pics might have otherwise imperceptible distortions at the edges of the images).

Interested to know if anyone has more knowledge of this. This isn’t helping Peter much, but would be nice to know for the future!

Thanks for all the great advice. I can see that a bit more research is needed.
I’m thinking I’ll try scanning it and stitching it together myself. I don’t have photoshop so I’ll be using gimp but as it’s a flat bed scan it shouldn’t be too tricky.

You don’t need to do the stitching manually, there’s a free open source image stitching tool called Hugin that will work for exactly what you’re trying to do: https://hugin.sourceforge.io/tutorials/scans/en.shtml

+1 for hugin. Really good software.

The key is to get consistently lit and positioned scans.
Personally I’d recommend leveraging the maker space and making a scanner box. These are usefull for all sorts of things and I’m sure a design that can be flat packed could be kept at the space for others to use afterwards.
Here is a link to several options with guides.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/build-smartphone-document-scanner/

Then all you need is to either iron the map flat (can be challenging) or to paste it to some foam board (destructive but makes an excellent poster afterwards)