Hack 90 Fax from Your Digital Camera

When a fax machine isn't handy but your digital camera is, you can still sign and return documents as if by fax magic .

Paper isn't going away, though there are days when I wish it would. A great example of such a time is when I receive a document in the mail that requires my signature and an immediate return fax. The signature part isn't usually a problem. But I often don't have a fax machine available. Fortunately, I always have my digital camera, which I can use to solve this problem.

Here's the basic procedure:

1. Sign the document.

2. Place it under an even light source and photograph it with a digital camera.

3. Upload the picture to your computer and open it in Photoshop.

4. Crop the image to standard document size .

5. Save the file as a PDF.

6. Attach the file to an email, with instructions on how to open and print it.

Once you get the hang of how to do this, your "digital-camera faxes" can actually look better than the output from half of the business fax machines being used today. But there are a few tricks you'll need to use along the way.

8.6.1 Photographing the Document

You want an accurate reproduction of the original document. With this technique, you'll be amazed at how good your "fax" will look. Follow this procedure to capture the image:

1. Place the document under an even light source, such as next to a north- facing window or beneath a desk lamp.

2. Put your digital camera in Close Up or Macro mode (look for the flower icon).

3. Adjust the white balance. If your camera has a Custom White Balance setting that reads the light and adjusts it accordingly , use that. Otherwise, use one of the presets, such as the Light Bulb preset for tungsten lighting.

4. If the document is printed on white paper, set your exposure compensation to +1.

5. Increase your ISO setting to 200 to avoid camera shake.

6. Hold the camera over the document so that the plane of the camera is parallel to the plane of the document. This helps eliminate distortion.

7. Make sure that the document is as squared-up as possible on the LCD monitor. Then take three or four shots of it.

8.6.2 Processing the Document

Now, you've essentially scanned your document. Upload the images to the computer, open them in Photoshop, and choose the best-looking one. You'll first want to rotate the image to make it vertical. Simply choose Image Rotate and rotate the picture 90. Next, you'll want to crop it to document size [Hack #65] . You'll want to set the width to 8 inches, the height to 10.5 inches, and the resolution to 150 pixels/inch, as shown in Figure 8-14.

Figure 8-14. Cropping the digital-camera fax

If you have any nasty color casts you want to eliminate, open Hue/Saturation and move the indicator on the Saturation bar all the way to the left, where it reads -100. This essentially removes the appearance of all color from the file. If you need to brighten the image, you can do so by moving the indicator on the Lightness bar to the right.

Once you have the appearance the way you want it, choose File Save As, give the document a descriptive name , and choose Photoshop PDF from the Format drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 8-15. Click OK.

Figure 8-15. Saving the document as a PDF file

You'll get a second dialog box, called PDF Options. Click the JPEG button and set Quality to 10. This provides you with a sharp-looking document and a small file size. The other option, ZIP, is a tad crisper but at a substantial cost. In my testing, the ZIP files were about 3.5 MB, while the high-quality JPEG files ran only about 750 KB and looked almost as good as the ZIPs. Save the bandwidth and go with the JPEG option.

Documents in Portable Document Format ( .pdf ) can be opened and printed on any computer platform. Plus, they rarely get corrupted when they're transferred by email.

8.6.3 Final Steps

All you have to do now is attach the file to an email and instruct the recipient to open it. The document will look darn close to the original. Figure 8-16 shows the final document with the signature. I printed it on a regular inkjet printer and compared it to the original. It holds up just fine.

Figure 8-16. The final digital-camera fax

Your digital-camera document is really no different from a regular faxexcept, that is, that it might look better.