KJM
TPF Noob!
Hi folks,
I've about 750 mounted slides, mostly Velvia, that I want to scan with my Epson Perfection 4490 flatbed scanner (Epson Perfection 4490 Photo Scanner, Overview - Product Information - Epson America, Inc.). The scanner has a 'holder' into which you drop the mounted slides.
I've scanned the first dozen or so, and the results are really poor. Very dark images, saturation is very weak. In short, the scans are nothing like the beautiful, sharp, detailed image as can be seen directly from the slide, even with a cheap, 20 slide viewer. The vibrant colours are all gone.
I'm wondering if there's any point continuing.
The accompanying software, EPSON Scan does allow tweaking of curves and saturation, but that seems like a lot of work to manually adjust every slide. And the results of the adjustments fall far short of the original slides.
What have people done before? Should I just scan the slides without adjusting in the scanner software, and hope to batch process all the slides with Photoshop afterwards? Is that even a realistic aspiration, since not every image will require the same adjustments? Is manual adjustment of individual images with Photoshop the only way I'll get decent results, and are such results only ever going to be a poor replica of the bright and vivid slides?
Thanks for the advice.
Ken.
P.S. I'm scanning at 4800 dpi and 48-bit colour (16-bit per channel). TIFF format, uncompressed.
I've about 750 mounted slides, mostly Velvia, that I want to scan with my Epson Perfection 4490 flatbed scanner (Epson Perfection 4490 Photo Scanner, Overview - Product Information - Epson America, Inc.). The scanner has a 'holder' into which you drop the mounted slides.
I've scanned the first dozen or so, and the results are really poor. Very dark images, saturation is very weak. In short, the scans are nothing like the beautiful, sharp, detailed image as can be seen directly from the slide, even with a cheap, 20 slide viewer. The vibrant colours are all gone.
I'm wondering if there's any point continuing.
The accompanying software, EPSON Scan does allow tweaking of curves and saturation, but that seems like a lot of work to manually adjust every slide. And the results of the adjustments fall far short of the original slides.
What have people done before? Should I just scan the slides without adjusting in the scanner software, and hope to batch process all the slides with Photoshop afterwards? Is that even a realistic aspiration, since not every image will require the same adjustments? Is manual adjustment of individual images with Photoshop the only way I'll get decent results, and are such results only ever going to be a poor replica of the bright and vivid slides?
Thanks for the advice.
Ken.
P.S. I'm scanning at 4800 dpi and 48-bit colour (16-bit per channel). TIFF format, uncompressed.