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The Process
I have been asked how I convert these mags into .PDF documents. My method may not be the easiest way to do this (or necessarily the best) but it works pretty well. So, here is a breif explaination of the process that I use.
Firstly, I scan all the magazine pages seperatly at 200dpi and then save them as hi-res .jpg files. The image size is usually something like 2180 x 1700 pixels which I never resize or crop.
I then take the seperate images into 'Dicreet Combustion' (which is a video compositing program by Autodesk). I find that using Combution is a simple way to create the two-page layout look that the magazine was originally designed for. Each two-page layout is then saved as a medium-res .jpg file.
I do a bit of retouching where necessary, particularly on the covers of magazines as I prefer them to be as clean as possible. For instance: in the example below there was a small cutout on the bottom of the cover which had to be filled and the missing text recreated.
Original scan Retouched image
Once all the layouts are complete, I then load them into the OpenOffice word processor (which I find works better for this than Microsoft Word) and export them as print optimized .PDF files.
Simple.
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