What are optimal scanner settings?

[e._electuur]

<p>I have a CannonScan 8600F scanner and want to scan old photo’s some of which lost most of their color and are almost completely orange. What are the best settings for the scanner? Questions I have are:</p>

<ul>

<li>Is it possible to influence the analog CCD signal before it is being sampled and digitized, with the controls in the scanner driver? I think this is not possible and that therefore I can’t use the controls to<br />improve the scan results with the scanner driver settings. So it is better to use a good photo editing software program to restore as much as possible of the photo.</li>

<li>What are the best scanner settings to get as close as possible to the RAW image of the CCD image of the scanner. For example: should I use linear gamma or the standard gamma 2.2?</li>

<li>What is the maximum size of the color space of a photo? Does it fit inside the color space of the scanner and does it make any difference which color space I use?</li>

<li>Does it make sense to use 48 bit scans or are the lower 8 bits only representing signal noise? Is it sensible to scan at the lowest needed resolution to reduce the noise in the CCD signal? Especially with<br />dark black and white photo’s with little contrast in the dark area’s?</li>

</ul>

<p>Any advice would be very welcome.</p>

[Stock-Photos]

<p>600 PPI</p>

[e._electuur]

<p>It’s nice to have a response, but I don’t see the connection between my questions, and the answer. Probably you didn’t read past the first paragraph. My questions are about differentiating between, and retrieving as much as possible the very little (color) contrasts in the photo’s. Not about the best resolution. Nor about the best color match with the original.</p>

<p>Thanks anyhow.</p>

[pankaj purohit]

<p>If you are using conon software for scaning then forget it and start using Vuescan, you'll get great results with way better dynamic range and details than canon software which itself applies some ugly software tweaking to the image after the scan. Vuescan utilizes all the hardware juice and faster too. its 2400 dpi resolution with multipass is enough for Canon 8600f, on the other hand 4800 of canon's software is useless because of some spatial effect applied by canon software to the scans.</p>

[e._electuur]

<p>I had a look at Vuescan and maybe it is better than the Cannon software. Nevertheless<br />it uses the Cannon scanner driver. Without it, Vuescan doesn’t work. On the<br />other hand it doesn’t answer my questions. Which controls in whatever software<br />influence the scanning process itself, and which controls are only computer<br />arithmetic on the scanned digitized data. Maybe the computer arithmetic in<br />Vuescan is better or easier to use then<br />a good photo editing program. I would like to know if I can influence the scanning<br />process itself, and with which controls. Is I for example possible to adjust<br />the luminance of the light tube to get a brighter photo, instead of<br />recalculating the pixels of the digital photo scan. Recalculation can’t create<br />data that wasn’t already in the data. Changing parameters of the scanning<br />process can retrieve information that isn’t in the data with other settings.<br>

<br /><br /></p>

<p><br /><br /></p>

 

[sfcole]

<ul>

<li><strong>Does it make sense to use 48 bit scans or are the lower 8 bits only representing signal noise? Is it sensible to scan at the lowest needed resolution to reduce the noise in the CCD signal? Especially with</strong><br /><strong>dark black and white photo’s with little contrast in the dark area’s?</strong></li>

</ul>

<p>Do you mean 48 bits for color or 16 bits for B&W?<br>

Some people advocate always using 16 bits for B&W, but I find it depends. Some images are easy to adjust without it. Difficult photos with problems in certain areas of tonality may need it. It may depend on the film. I almost never use 48 bits for color. The files are huge and it doesn't seem to help.</p>

[AlanKlein]

<p>Whether you can effect the scan process itself or not, how much data do you expect from a picture that's "almost completely orange" that you can restore the colors. I have had success using color restoration of underwater slides that tended to be blue. But that was done without changes to the scan process (I'm using a Epson V600 so I can't comment on you scanner's capability.) However, I doubt if you'll be able to recover colors from such an orange picture. By the way, you said photos. I assume you're referring to prints not the original film. Which is it?</p>

[yoshio]

<p>Hello</p>

 

<ul>

<li>Is it possible to influence the analog CCD signal before it is being sampled and digitized, with the controls in the scanner driver? I think this is not possible and that therefore I can’t use the controls to</li>

</ul>

<p>in flatbed scanners not that I know of or have ever found evidence to support directly, but I do have anecdotal evidence that changing some settings in Epson scanners makes scan times longer ... see <strong><a href="http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/2008/10/epson-3200-more-optimal-scans.html">this</a> </strong>reference</p>

 

<ul>

<li>improve the scan results with the scanner driver settings. So it is better to use a good photo editing software program to restore as much as possible of the photo.</li>

</ul>

<p>definately, and it can reduce time taken in post processing (<strong><a href="http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/2009/10/quick-negative-scan-tutorial.html">reference</a></strong>)</p>

<ul>

<li>What are the best scanner settings to get as close as possible to the RAW image of the CCD image of the scanner. For example: should I use linear gamma or the standard gamma 2.2?</li>

</ul>

<p>see above reference</p>

 

<ul>

<li>What is the maximum size of the color space of a photo? Does it fit inside the color space of the scanner and does it make any difference which color space I use?</li>

</ul>

<p>uncertain, but will vary on type of film. I belive that going to big a colourspace will introduce noise by posterisation</p>

 

<ul>

<li>Does it make sense to use 48 bit scans or are the lower 8 bits only representing signal noise? Is it sensible to scan at the lowest needed resolution to reduce the noise in the CCD signal? Especially with<br />dark black and white photo’s with little contrast in the dark area’s?</li>

</ul>

<p>very much so, but mainly because you are unable to tune the analog gain to fit within the circuit and the filmtype. I belive most scanners are designed with the range of E6 films in mind, Neg often results in greater stresses on the systems as Blue channel often has a small range. I do not believe that CCD noise is in any way influenced by scan density. Software will make a better fist of noise reduction if you scan at higher resolution - denoise - reduce<br>

^,^</p>

[e._electuur]

<p>Yoshio, I am pleased to see that you give real answers to the questions I asked. But my questions concern photo prints on photographic paper (B/W and Color), made between 1950 and 2000. (Maybe I posted my question in the wrong forum subject?) For digitizing film negatives I use my photo camera with macro lens and blue filter in combination with the head of a color enlarger without lens. This works much faster than the CanoScan scanner.</p>

<p>In the mean time I discovered that Vuescan has I checkbox titled RAW, which I think does what it suggests to do. I am planning to do some test scans to check if this is a good way to scan the photo’s</p>