I was emailed for advice about using a scanner to scan photos and slides thought I should share. My comments are in red.
I have an EPSON V700 PHOTO scanner and wanted your opinion on what settings I should use… Editing in Photoshop Elements 7.
Most but not all of the pics I’m scanning are black and white. Some are old color pics of various ages.
IAFS. I use mostly the professional mode because you have so much more control or the full auto for one set up and speed of scanning. Don’t see the value in the home or office mode for photographers but does work.
Specify resolution for Full Auto Mode — Photograph/Document default is 300 DPI, it has a drop down box with what seems like odd variations to me (50, 72, 96, 150, 200, 240, 266, 300, 350, 360, 400, 600, 720, 800, 1200)
IAFS. Default mode is good. These are your dots per inch choices (also known as PPI, pixels per inch) for scanning. You choose how many dots per inch based what you want the final size of the print to be. Rule of thumb for best print quality is for 300dpi at whatever size you are printing. If you scan a 4X6 photo at 300dpi but then want to make an 8X10 (8X12) print. Since you are enlarging twice as big the DPI will be cut in half to 150. So, if you know that you want to make the 4X6 to an 8X12 print you should scan it at 600 (twice the 300dpi standard)
— Note: same choices for film
IAFS. same applies
Dust removal toggle (on/off)
IAFS. This might only be available on film but I generally leave off on photos if available. If you use this on film but be careful, Could make the scan less sharp.
Color Restoration toggle (on/off)
IAFS. Leave off, you can generally do better with Photoshop
Auto photo orientation toggle (on/off)
IAFS. Cool feature, doesn’t matter works most of the time but not all the time
Then there is another drop down box for file save settings….
The default is JPEG (.jpg) with compression level default 16, encoding standard, embed ICC profile on
— compression level can apparently be between 1 and 100 and on the slide it shows 16 being on the “high quality” end versus “low quality” for higher numbers
—- encoding can either be STANDARD or PROGRESSIVE
—- embed ICC profile is a toggle (on/off)
Other type settings available are:
.pdf —PDF which seems to be for text
.bmp – BITMAP (no options)
.tif – Multi TIFF (options — compression: none or CCITT group 4
.tif – TIFF
.tif – print image matching II [TIF]
.jpg – print image matching II [JPEG]
IAFS. Leave as is at default. JPEG this way is universal. You don’t want bitmap for photos and Tiff’s non compressed are large files and not universally read. Not sure what the print matching TIFF and Jpeg’s are.
HOME Skip
has image type options – color, grayscale or black& white
destination options – screen/web, printer, other
resolution – default 300 DPI
image adjustment toggles – descreening, color restorations, backlight correction, digital ICE technology
along with brightness and contrast slides (both set in the middle as defaults)
OFFICE Skip
resolution – default 300 dpi
image adjustments toggles — unsharp mask, descreening,
image options – text enhancement
auto area segmentation
dropout – (red default — has drop down box that I can’t get to )
color enhance – (red default – has drop down box that I can’t get to)
PROFESSIONAL
image type – 8, 16, 24 or 48 bit color, color smoothing or black&white
IAFS. 16 bit black and white or 48 bit color ypu can only save as Tiff or PSD (photoshop) files do not recommend unless you are a real purist. Use 8 bit black and white and 24 bit color and save as jpegs
target size – original or you can set the size dimensions
IAFS. You should be able to use a marquee to select just where you want to scan. Lets say you have an old polaroid photo that has a large border but you only want the photo image, you draw the marquee around just the image. You should also have a DPI or PPI setting. Leave at 300 ppi.
scale – % default 100% can go over 2000% and down to 8%
IAFS. Just like in the full auto mode this is where you should know how large you want to make the final print. Lets say you have a 3X3 image you set up to scan at 300ppi. You want to be able to print it as a 4X6. You scan at 200%, doubling your size. You will end up with a 6X6 at 300ppi that you can crop to fit a standard 4X6 print.
trimming – off or on Not sure what this is. Leave off
adjustments —– these all look like things I shouldn’t fiddle with unless I want an Andy Worhol affect or you are looking over my shoulder;) Don’t use here. Adjust in Photshop
– histogram
– tone
– image
– color palette
unsharp mask level – high/medium or low (medium default) OK
descreening – screen ruling — general (default) or newspaper (85 lpi) or magazine (133 lpi) or fine print (175 lpi) IAFS. Leave off for scanning photos. This feature is used when scanning from an image that was printed by a printing press. These images are broken into tiny littles dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. These dots are what the press is printing. The dots are created be screens for each four colors. The more dots per inch the sharper or cleared the image may appear. To scan a printed image as such you need to descreen it.
Hope this helps