Scanning Money for the Million Dollar Ball: Moire Patterns

See the colors?  Click on a bill for a larger image.

I was trying to pick out colors for the http://MillionDollarBall.org website from my original low resolution scans of the $1 bill (http://abighairyspider.blogspot.com/2011/06/million-dollar-ball-first-scans.html) and then thought to scan the bill again, this time as a “photograph” and not as a “document” using the descreen function.

The descreen function in this Canon software tries to keep those color artifacts from being produced by the alignment of the pixels being scanned and screen pattern on the subject.  The artifact is called a Moiré pattern.

Well, I love the colors on these scans, so I think that’s how the bills for the Ball will be scanned.

Besides, in photograph mode, the scanning software doesn’t try to discard data below a threshold — so it picks up more of the character of the paper.  You can even see the place in the middle where this bill was folded at one time.