[Techtalk] getting quality photo scans

[Akkana Peck]

Carla Schroder writes:
> I have a big batch of photographs I want to scan, and I'm having problems 
> getting good scans. They lose a bit of sharpness and the colors are 
> off a little bit, even at the maximum resolution.

Have you fiddled with the brightness and color settings in the xsane
dialogs? (GIMP uses xsane to scan on Linux; I would assume Kooka
does as well.) I find that with my Epson 2400 Photo, the default
brightness settings were way off, so everything came out highly
overexposed and awful looking; I worried about the scanner until
I discovered the extra dialogs for adjusting all that stuff, and
set the exposure a couple of clicks down.  (Fortunately xsane, at
least when run though gimp, remembers those settings so you only
have to do that once.)

Of course, if you're using the auto exposure settings, the
brightness and colors will also depend on which part of the image
you selected during the preview.

Sharpness problems could be a bad sign: an exposure problem might
make an image look somewhat less sharp, but if it's really fuzzy and
out of focus, then the problem may be the scanner (or poor SANE
support for it). My scanner has a slide attachment but I've found it
unusable because the slides are never quite in focus, and at least
under xsane there are only two focus settings, one for photos or
film that's directly on the glass and one for slides which are a
little above the glass; there's no way to fine tune from there.
I've often been curious whether the Windows drivers allow finer
adjustment of focus.

> Should I be looking at getting a different scanner, or different software? Or 
> is it not realistic to expect perfect copies of photos from scans?

You should be able to get very good scans of print photos. Most
modern scanners have vastly more resolution than you typically need,
and should give a very sharp image. Do expect to spend some time
tweaking settings (scanned area, plus brightness/contrast/colors)
for each image, though: if you try to treat it as an assembly line,
scanning lots of images all at the same settings, you probably won't
get great results.

-- 
    ...Akkana
    "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional": http://gimpbook.com