1. A method comprising the acts of: receiving a user request through a user interface of a general purpose computer; in response to the user request, capturing a first image of the first surface under a first set of lighting conditions, the first surface having three dimensions, wherein aspects of the first and second dimensions define at least two boundaries of the surface and aspects of the third dimension encode information; storing the first image in a memory resource; also in response to the same user request, capturing a second image of the first surface under a second set of lighting conditions; storing the second image in the memory resource; using a processor resource of the general purpose computer to combine the first image with the second image to form a first combined image, the act of combining employing differences between the images to enhance the decipherability of the encoded information; and receiving the output of a character recognition operation, the output comprising a set of machine readable characters corresponding to the information encoded in the third dimension of the of the first surface.