Any suggestions to scan underexposed slide by Polaroid SS4000?

One of my lens aperture always keep as f22 no matter what apperture I

set. So I obtained many under exposed slides before I really find the

reason of the problem(I always thought I did not handle light well).

I have a Polaroid SS4000 scanner with SilverFast5 software. Scanner

is calibrated with Photoshop. I do not know if there is a way to scan

those dark slides? I follow Ian Lyons' suggestion to setup silverfast

software and result of those underexposed slides is too dark to

recover by photoshop.

Thanks in advance for any help! I do have some beautiful scenes in

those slides and I feel so sad that I could not get them on the print!

James.

James,<BR>

<BR>

There is no magic that will retrieve information that is not present in the image. However, I have found that Vuescan allows me to maximze the results that I can get from my Polaroid SS4000. You might want to download the demo, which is identical to the full program except that it puts a "$40" watermark on the image until you enter a registration number. You can obtain Vuescan from the author's web site at:<BR>

<BR>

<a href="http://www.hamrick.com">Hamrick Software</a><BR>

<BR>

If you are not satisfied with the results you get from Vuescan using the default settings, on the "Device" tab select the "Advanced" option type and then go to the "Color" tab. Play with the "brightness", "black point", "white point", and "image curve" settings to see if you can get satisfactory results from your slides. FWIW, I have found that looking at the effect on the Scan Histogram of changing these variables is often very useful.<BR>

<BR>

Many people have said that the user interface is not very intuitive, but after playing with the settings for a little while I found it very easy to use to extract the maximum from an image - <b>much</b> easier to use than Silverfast. YMMV. The nice thing is that you can try it for as long as you wish before actually spending money ($40) to buy it.<BR>

<BR>

With best wishes,<BR>

- Tom -

You can use Insight, it will work fine with underexposed source material. Scan in raw image mode, i.e., no corrections, and then do the corrections in Photoshop. You will generally get better results this way. When I tried Vuescan, I found that scanning in raw image mode there worked better than using the corrections. No need to spend money on it if you have Insight and are going to do the corrections in PS.