With a flatbed scanner:
Begin by using a flatbed scanner (e.g. Epson Perfection Photo series with transparency option) to scan the face of your plaque shell at 1200dpi with a calibrating ruler nearby. Next, scan your Silastic carrier at 1200 dpi in backlit transparency mode. If you have several 10 mm carriers, you may wish to scan each of them to look for variability. Eye Physics uses VueScan from Hamrick Software to capture our images.
Orient the plaque as symmetrically as possible with the suture eyelets towards the top of the picture. Orient the carrier so that the center seed is vertical. Include a translucent ruler with 1 mm increments along the top edge of the picture. Good file formats to use are either ".png" or ".jpg". For best cosmetic results, use the Adobe Photoshop program to crop the scans and make the background surrounding the plaque and carrier transparent as illustrated on the right. Save the files in .png format to preserve transparency. Sample .png files for many COMS plaques are included in the Plaque Simulator download.