Laurie Carr

I scanned this picture of the gorgeous Laurie Carr from a Playboy magazine about 10 years ago. Not too sure if I’ve ever released it, but I remembered that the scan was pretty small.

This was mainly due to 2 reasons:

Firstly, the abysmal quality of the print. Now, I’ve scanned plenty of images from magazines in my time, and I reckon that American magazines have just about the worst print quality. Tissue paper thin pages and half-tone patterns the size of golf balls, it takes A LOT of work to make the images look halfway decent. Playboy is by no means the worst offender, but they’re up there. Anyway, one of the tricks to improve quality is to down-sample your image, i.e. make your image smaller. If you scrunch your image small enough, even the lousiest retouch can look good. It’s sorta like how a low bit-rate movie file can look pretty good on your portable PMP but looks like crap on your PC monitor. :)

Secondly, big monitors were a rarity back then. After all, it made no sense of scan something larger than what your monitor can display, right?

And there’s another reason I didn’t mention….my skillz weren’t very good then, so that was the best I could do. Larger images really highlight any deficiencies in your retouching, and can be distracting (in a bad way).

Anyway, I hope that I’ve improved some since then. :)

This scan of Laurie Carr is released under my dScans WWSA series. And yeah, it contains tasteful nudity. So for those of you who are offended by this kind of stuff, consider yourself duly warned.

Grab the scan here.