Telescope Reviews: Questions about scanner settings

Tommy - I've banged my head against the scanner wall for months to finally come to grips with it. It will take awhile for you to understand what those options mean - and do during a scan.

Nightfly has allot of experience with the Epsons, and I would suggest using his settings as a guideline. You need to get the basics working first and then build on that. Default settings are fine for this.

My advice - select ONE option or setting at a time. DO NOT ADJUST 2 or 3 things and then scan. One at a time. Record you test scans - all the parameters. Make notes to compare each scan, with the ONE thing adjusted. Once you find what it's doing - find a balanced setting and then move onto the next.

The purple shift is usually a sign of the GAMMA being to high and / or exposure being too aggressive. The scanner is trying to dig out detail from the shadows, and sometimes gives a purple or magenta colour.

Gamma - for WinDOH - try 1.8, 2.0, and 2.2. Somewhere around 2.0 should work fine. Put all other settings to default, select Gamma and scan. Makes notes, scan at the next higher Gamma. Do low resolution scans for test purposes. No use tying up Ram and disk space. Around 600 dpi should do fine to get an idea of what's going on.

Exposure 12 brings out the grain. Once you find which Gamma setting works best - leave it set and do not adjust. Now work on the exposure and start at a lower setting eg: 3. Do a low rez scan. Change it to 4, and do another scan. Compare the frames side by side if you can, make notes.

Set scanner to 48 bit scans.
Make sure you set the other parameters to match your monitor icc - if you can. Did you get an IT8 card which has a bar code on it, and above that a bunch of vertical coloured lines? If so, you use that card to calibrate the scanner. That is critical. Read the manual on how to calibrate.

Leave Highlight and Shadow at 0 for now. We can work on those later. Do NOT use any Saturation or Curves or Tones settings in the scanner. Leave that for PhotoShop.

If the software lists a bunch of suggestions for scanning - like
Standard
Evening
Snow etc - pick STANDARD. If you use the other settings, you will get clipping of your histogram. If you have a histogram on the scanner software, click on it and check to ensure both left and right sides are all the way from 0 to 255. Corrections to be done in PhotoShop to tighten them up.

Source and Target settings may need to be set for the scanner to know what's going on. Source - it may have 2 settings - and you select either -
Reflective (scanning photos)
Transparency - this will have 2 settings - Negative - Positive.

If you don't set this properly - the scanner may assume Reflective, and use those values - when in fact you have a negative. End result - crazy colours.

When set up properly, and you select Negative - the scanner software MAY allow you to select the film type, ie: Kodak, Fuji etc. Also the film type - eg: Superia, and the ISO - eg: 400 for that film type. Now you have refined some settings - better scans.

Target - I usually just have the file as Save. I can scan a few in a row, then open PhotoShop and look at them one at a time or in pairs for comparison.

Hope this helps. Let us know how it's going. I hope I haven't made your head spin with all this. Mine did for months. It almost came to a point where I was going to drop it off the roof. Now it's working very well, but it was a close call.

Igor

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The StarGeezer

Those who trade liberty for security have neither. ~John Adams

TEC 140 (Katyusha) & F/F - Equinox 80 - Losmandy G11/Gemini - ST-4 guider. PENTAX 67ii - 400(EDif) & siblings. I shoot FILM.