Taking Digital Photos Of Drawings For Take-off

SIDrywall

I am just wondering if anyone is familiar with taking digital photos of drawings to import into your computer for doing take-off using a program like on screen take off. I am thinking that the angle you hold your camera at will have an effect on the scale. I was toying around with it quick the other night and calibrated the scale and it seemed to work, but could it be that I just got lucky? Any help with this would be appreciated.

Thanks

Aladdin Builders

I have had some BAD luck w/ photos of plans!
I too use OnCenter and Planswift and will only accept digital files or take the plans to a local scan shop and have them put on a disc or they will email them to ya...

__________________
Aladdin Builders
South Florida
www.AladdinBuilders.com
www.surfacesbyAladdin.com

wallmaxx

The problem with photos is that the lens in the camera is curved so the plan image is not digitized "flat". It will be a different scale at the center as compared to the edges of the image.

Only a flatbed scanner can give you a true scalable image.

Leo G

I do this all the time. The angle of the photo makes little difference. I have a program that will make it flat again. The thing that I have the most problems with is glare. The program I use is paintshop pro. The function is called perspective correct.

before


after

__________________
Sawdust Follows Me Everywhere

http://lrgwood.com
Custom Cabinets in Hartford County Connecticut

ScipioAfricanus

I have done something similar to this for "digitizing" old plans that I need to incorporate into as-built drawings. I tack or staple said plans to the wall then stand back as far as I can and zoom in with the camera.
This helps in making the distortion of the plans minimized. I use the flash and have not had a problem with the flash washing out the picture.
The program I use lets me import the pic then scale to actual size usingthe dimensions on the plan. I can then trace over the floor plan in inserting walls, doors, windows etc. and get a very accurate material list. Works great for me.

Andy.

Aladdin Builders

Leo, thanks for this tip!

__________________
Aladdin Builders
South Florida
www.AladdinBuilders.com
www.surfacesbyAladdin.com

GregS

You can't just get electronic versions of the drawings?

msteinhoff

As Leo noted, you can fix that problem with just about any image manipulation tool.

When I need to copy documents bigger than my flatbed scanner, I
use a photography copy stand that I bought at a yard sale years ago. Mine isn't as fancy as this one...

marietta.edu/~mcshaffd/macro/copy.html

...but you get the idea.

If I'm out in the field, I just stand above the document and try to keep the camera's image sensor parallel to the document. More often than not, it works well enough.

The other hint I can give you is to jack the contrast way up in your photo software. That'll really make the edges pop out and be easier to find.

Cheers,
Matt