[Techtalk] getting quality photo scans

[Carla Schroder]

On Thursday 16 November 2006 14:05, Akkana Peck wrote:
> 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.
>

>
> 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.

The scans I've tried so far lose a fair bit of fine details, no matter how I 
tweak the settings. Kooka is a front-end for sane, and I've tried 
command-line sane stuff as well. 

>
> > 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.

These are old family photographs, so I'm OK with spending time on it. I just 
don't want to beat my head on the wrong wall. :)

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Carla Schroder
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