UKC

I don't seem to be getting on too well with this.

Had a play over the weekend at scanning some old 6x4 35mm shots. (The most recent five in my gallery.)

See: http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?t=237089

I played around with various resolutions on the scanner and discovered for example that at 9600 dpi I produced a 7 gig file which couldn't even be opened by IE7 to view it.

I settled on experimenting between 300 and 600 dpi. I opened the saved images in Photoshop and resized them to approx 800x550 pixels, and saved for web to get the file size down.

They are not satisfactory at all (see gallery) and have an almost cartoon like quality, which doesn’t resemble the original photos at all. If I up the dpi it doesn't seem to help, it just seems to produce bigger and bigger files which actually look worse and worse. If I buy a better scanner with massive potential dpi am I not just going to get even more enormous files which don’t do justice to the photos?

I have the scanner set at 24bit colours, it’s highest setting. Is there something else I should be doing to get better scans, or is the scanner just kak.

o)

TIA

G

In reply to Graham:

i just used a cheap and cheerful epson scanner to scan my 6x4 prints to put on my flickr site.

flickr seems to sort out the resizing for you.

i think I scan at 300dpi.

In reply to CJD:

Well I am doing something wrong, aside from not taking pictures that are anything like as good as yours in the first place, as the results I am getting with a scanner are awful.

:-o

G

In reply to Graham:

that's odd.

I definitely don't do anything fancy with mine!

In reply to Graham: I am new to scanning so am not trying to say I know everything about them, your pics look like they need sharpening, (as CJD does, 300 dpi is perfect res to scan at BTW), when down sizing are you using bicubic sharper? that works well, the colour balance looks out on some of them also, I have had similar results to those posted on some of my recent slide shots and rescanned using 'professional mode and turned everything off i.e. colour settings, sharpening settings etc, (although they can help on poor quality images) but if the pics look ok then you are better setting everything in the scanner to manual, loads more I can think of but without having the images on screen as I'm typing its tuff to advise whats fo the best, I'll have another look on my mac's colour calibrated screen and use the laptop to type my message, may not be this evening though.

In reply to Graham: had a very quick play with this one, any better?
http://brek.smugmug.com/gallery/2059210#144304651-L-LB

In reply to ICE:

i scanned the colour ones in the same way, i.e. on epson auto settings, and it seemed to work fine.

In reply to ICE:

Cheers, mate.

Thanks for your advice.

G

In reply to ICE:

Phew, your gallery is awesome! Love the shot of The Big Buckle, btw!



G

In reply to Graham: that is your image (you did get that, its not me being dense is it?) I had a play in PS to see if I could get it looking more 'correct'.

In reply to Graham: Try this software to run your scanner

http://www.hamrick.com/


- set on auto it works a treat, a lot better than the Nikon software thet came with my scanner, and its good for mono negs too.

In reply to Graham:

You seem to be a little confused about resolution.

Resolution, for your purposes at least, is only relevant for printing your pics, not how they appear on screen. The reason for this is simple: almost all monitors have a resolution of 72 dots per inch (DPI), with a very few being 96 DPI.

When you print your pics out, it's different; an inkjet printer can happily cram 1280 dots or more into a square inch, because the dots it produces are tiny. The pixels on your screen are huge by comparison!

So when you scan a pic at higher and higher resolutions, you get more and more detail. That means when you print it, you can print at a higher resolution while the picture remains the same width and height. But on screen, the higher the res you scan at, the more pixels the picture will have in it. And because your monitor is fixed at 72DPI, that makes it much wider and higher.

Hope this helps!

In reply to Rhoddy Stewart: just downloaded it, I do a bit of black and white now, so I am interested to try it.

In reply to ICE:

Yes, I had realised that!

Your edited version looks much better than what I came up with, but neither look like the original photo??????

G

In reply to niggle:

Yes, I think I was.

Have now read a bit from various websites. So if a better resolution doesn't equal better quality for on-screen viewing what does? My scanner doesn't seem to produce even a half decent scan of the original photos. Why? Is it just shit? If so, how do I know a scanner I might buy is any better if I can't just rely on it being able to scan at a better dpi? What else affects the quality?

TIA.

G

In reply to Graham:

the one I use cost about £60 and is an Epson Perfection <some number> - I'll have a look when I get to work and post it on here.

it doesn't seem to do anything fancy or complicated, just scans pics and they end up looking like the original.

In reply to CJD:

it's an Epson Perfection 2480 Photo scanner.

I think they've been discontinued, boo.