Z said:
I just upgraded to the 4990 Pro from my 1200 purchased in 9/99. My scanner
came with SilverFast Ai. When using Photoshop, I see that I can use
Silverfast or the Epson scanner driver. The Epson enables ICE, while the
Silverfast evidently does not. My initial job will be scanning a set of
about fifty roughly 40 year old proofs. The photos are mostly color, with
some black and white. Future scanning jobs will always be photos. I have a
Ricoh 1035 for office document work. I am a novice at this, and am not
seeking to become a pro. Thus, I would like the hardware and software to do
most of the hard work, and I will expend a little additional effort in
Photoshop to finish it up.
Questions: should I be using Silverfast or Epson to initiate my scans?
Should I scan at 600dpi? I can fit four photos on the glass at the same
time, which will drastically speed up my job, but will I sacrifice quality?
Should I be saving my scans in Photoshop's notice format, or another format?
I'll second most of One4All's advice.
The 2 possible problems when scanning multiple photos are using less
than optimum areas of the scanning bed (you'll just have to test this)
and getting a one-size-fits-all autoexposure (but this shouldn't be a
problem if you scan each image separately with its own marquee).
Silverfast AI is considerably more powerful than Epson Scan. It's a
little harder to get used to, but not overly so. Its biggest strength
is its many different color correction tools and its higher-quality
automation features. Unfortunately, the interface gets in the way, and
there are lots of obscure technical settings that might or might not
affect your output. Give it a try and see if you like the results any
better, but don't fret if it's just too much to handle.
Read the Scantips book or website. Read it again. If nothing else,
learn to read and use a histogram if you don't know already--it's all
you'll really need for most adjustments. Epson Scan's "Auto" exposure
button cuts out too much highlight and shadow detail from negatives for
my tastes, but it should work fine for your prints. Just remember to
crop the scanning marquee so that it contains only the print and no
surroundings, and apply autoexposure (and any custom adjustments) to
each image separately. Unless your scans are your final output, you
should *probably* turn off unsharp mask and save sharpening for
Photoshop, since it can cause all sorts of problems during later
adjustments. ICE for prints was unimpressive on my 4870 and sometimes
broke more than it fixed; test it well before deciding whether to use
it. Leave descreening off unless you're working with halftone prints
(newspaper, magazine, etc.).
300 dpi/ppi is plenty for most print scans. Use higher sampling only
if you think you might want the extra size at some point
(enlargements?) *and* the 600ppi scan shows additional detail when
compared 1:1 to the 300ppi image Bicubic resized to 200% in Photoshop.
Otherwise you can just resize the 300ppi scan when needed.
Save as TIFF if you plan to do much editing to your images, since JPEGs
get messier each time you save them. But they're OK if you don't have
much disk space and don't plan to edit them further.
Also, you didn't ask, but you should be fine with the
24bit/8bit-per-channel setting. 48bit is mostly for major corrections
like substantially brightening the darkest shadows or converting
between wide color spaces (not likely to arise in your prints). Use it
only if you have a compelling reason.
There was discussion recently about whether Epson Scan can output
anything other than sRGB color. Since you don't want any hassle,
you're best off sticking to sRGB output whether in Epson Scan or
Silverfast. Anything else will look wrong in many applications unless
you convert it to sRGB in Photoshop. However, if you understand color
management, you could go with AdobeRGB or similar to preserve more of
the print's color range. If so, you might want to test whether Epson
Scan's "Adobe RGB" output matches up to Silverfast's. If it doesn't,
that's one more reason to go with Silverfast.
Hope this helps get you going.
false_dmitrii
