Scanning photographs

[time]

We've been playing with a low end Epson scanner, the 1250 Photo. It comes with a slide and film adaptor, but I've been unhappy with the results. Scans of photographic prints have slight tonal problems with blue/green colors, but that's more an irritation. The big gripe is that scans of 35mm negatives end up with a fairly strong yellow cast.

Although some adjustment is possible in the scanning software, I cannot completely correct the sickly yellow hue.

I think Epson is trying to give me the run around, so I would appreciate any pearls of wisdom anyone can throw my way.

 

[Mercutio]

Perhaps some work with a more sophisticated photo editor? Gimp is free, if you don't have anything else.

Also are you sure your monitor is properly calibrated for image work?

 

[time]

Let me rephrase the problem.

The normal scans have reasonable color accuracy.

Scans with the film attachment (with its own external light source) are yellowish.

One possible explanation is that the external light is too purple (therefore exposed areas on the negative come out yellow).

Epson says that the light is a fluorescent with a color temperature of 65000K, and are suggesting that this will be bluish, so negative scans will be yellowish.

My problem is that if true, doesn't that make their scanner useless?

 

[Mercutio]

The keyword is "low-end". I'd be willing to bet your attachment's light source isn't right, regardless of what Epson says.
Is the source color temp adjustable? I think if you can set it up around 9300K (it's four digits, right?), you should shift your "normal" output toward red, rather than blue, so somewhere in between those two values there ought to be a happy medium.

Wouldn't you get better results with a dedicated negative scanner anyway?

 

[Tea]

I'm surprised to hear that you aren't getting any sense out of Epson Service. They always used to be excellent. And Epson scanners are not exactly low end - they start at two or three times the price of thet major selling ones.

 

[Pradeep]

The 1250 is a low end one Tony. The 1650 is the next one up and costs a fair bit more. Mum's got a 1250 and it doens't have the lit top. But I do have the lit lid on my Agfa e50 and the negative scans from that are not crash hot. I guess we get what we pay for.

 

[time]

Is the source color temp adjustable? I think if you can set it up around 9300K (it's four digits, right?), you should shift your "normal" output toward red, rather than blue, so somewhere in between those two values there ought to be a happy medium.

Wouldn't you get better results with a dedicated negative scanner anyway?

LOL. No, the color temp is not adjustable - neither is much else for that matter, but that belongs to a separate grizzle.

The scanner is not for me, it's for customers. Compared to Canon and others, this is practically a mid-range scanner, believe it or not :-?

Tea, I thought they were good too. We'll see how this pans out, but right now I could really do with some opinions on whether or not the results sound acceptable.

 

[Tea]

Sorry Time, I know very, very little about scanners, or any image-related stuff for that matter. Years ago, I had persistent problems with two particular Epson printers (ones that broke and were fixed, broke again, fixed, broke again) and wrote to their service people. (Real writing, on paper I mean.) I could not have been happier with their response, and have been a rusted-on Epson fan ever since.

In one instance, the printer was four or five months out of warranty but it had had a history of problems, this was the third failure I think. They wrote back to me and said "Mr Wilson, if we send you a brand-new Epson printer, would you mind presenting it to your customer with our compliments?" A newer, better model too. I never forgot that.

But it's a long, long time ago. In the, oh, maybe five or seven years since then, we simply have not had any issues to raise with them. We have had very few Epson printers fail, and every one has been fixed promptly and without trouble.

Oh, except for the horrible little Stylus 480. They were mucho el-crappo. Especially after the superb little 440 and 460 models that just worked every time. We flogged off our stock of them to a competitor at below cost, went to Hewlett-Packard for a time. Which is another story.

None of which has anything much to do with your problem, I'm afraid. We make maybe $10 on a printer. If people call us with a tech support problem, we are very polite and quite firm: we fix computers sir. For printers, call Epson. Here is the number.

Oh, and by way of background and from memory, the Oz scanner market goes like this (retail prices):

Generic things: $100 to $200, mostly around $150.
Cannon and the like: $200ish.
Epson: $350 to $600

I despise Canon printers - terrible things with driver software to make early Nvidia drivers look good - but I'm becoming rather fond of the cute little 670 scanners. Sold a few now, none came back. And that, I'm afraid Time, is the only two things I know about scanners: the price and the RMA rate.

 

[Mercutio]

Geez those generics are expensive. The drugstore(!) down the street from my apartment sells crap-o Canon and Lexmark scanners and printers for $40.

My experience with imaging stuff is that there's a big difference in what can be done with low-cost consumer stuff and dedicated-use professional stuff, and then a quantum leap up to print/publishing level equipment (drum scanners, photo processors). The low-end stuff isn't even close to a bargain. Ever. Even if your monitor/printer is balanced exactly right, you never get the same output as what you put in.

I've worked with some publishing-quality processing equipment (made by a company called Lucht, basically built around a generic PC and running an Operating system called Rox). The machine basically could apply changes to actual photographic prints in the same way that Photoshop can to your TIFF files. Unbelievably cool stuff, that.

 

[Stereodude]

Try scanning slides and see how they look. The color cast is most likely from the tint of the negative. There is no such thing as "clear" on a color negative. They're redish brown where they have been not been exposed to light. I suspect that if you invert the scanned image you'd find it looks a lot like the negative does to your eye. You need to use photoshop or the like to adjust the color so that the colors from the negative are corrected to what was originally photographed.

Stereodude

 

[time]

Mercutio,

Tony usually quotes Australian pricing in Australian dollars, and including tax.

As a minimum, divide by two for US$. Items such as monitors are often worse - reduce to 40% or even lower.

So an item that costs US$400 may cost from AU$800 to AU$1000 here ...

Unfortunately, the standard of living has fallen to such an extent that the "average" income here is a little under AU$40k (I think), which is about US$20k. So US$100 has about the same effect on your budget as AU$100 on ours.

Hence the lack of popularity of high end equipment over here.

 

[Tea]

There are el-cheapo scanners that sell for under $100 AU, Mercutio. Canon have a parallel port one that retails for about $120 or so, I think. Actually, come to think of it, why don't we sell that one? Lots of people just want a very basic model, after all. I have avoided it simply because of the parallel port interface and the merry hell that can play with printer drivers .... but now that USB is readily available in printers ... Hmmm.

 

[time]

Stereodude,

Thanks for the suggestions.

We have Photoshop, and the cast is bad enough to make complete correction very difficult (beyond my patience, in other words).

If anyone is interested, I can email (compressed) both the positive and negative scans we are using in our discussion with Epson.

 

[Stereodude]

Stereodude,

Thanks for the suggestions.

We have Photoshop, and the cast is bad enough to make complete correction very difficult (beyond my patience, in other words).

If anyone is interested, I can email (compressed) both the positive and negative scans we are using in our discussion with Epson.

I'll take 'em, but you probably can't e-mail them to my yahoo.com addy (unless they're less than about 2 meg total).

Stereodude

 

[Corvair]

Flatbed photo print scanners, with one exception (a particular US$40K+ Scitex model), are always poor *film* scanners. This is especially true if you need to digitise a negative.

A flatbed photo scanner cannot handle the wide dynamic range of a typical slide (positive). Neither can a flatbed photo scanner handle the compressed dynamic range of a negative. The optics of a typical flatbed scanner are poor as well.

If you want to scan film imagery you either need a true film scanner or you need to have your film images printed to a photographic print for scanning on your flatbed.

 

[Mercutio]

Mercutio,
Tony usually quotes Australian pricing in Australian dollars, and including tax.

Unlike Jason on SR, I was already taking that into account. I made almost exactly the same post just about a week ago.
Geez. You'd think the el-cheapo stuff in Oz would at least cheap enough to be actually disposable. I might feel bad about throwing away a US$50 scanner. No probablem at all throwing away a $30 one, though.

I've sold $50 Acer USB flatbeds a couple of times. Usually to grandmothers looking to take their scrapbook hobby in a new direction. USB makes cheap scanners suck a lot less. Parallel Pass-through or dealing with the user-confusion of a second printer port both drove me insane.
Image quality still isn't great, but there's a lot to be said for not dealing with a parallel port any more.

 

[Corvair]

Scans with the film attachment (with its own external light source) are yellowish.

One possible explanation is that the external light is too purple (therefore exposed areas on the negative come out yellow).

Epson says that the light is a fluorescent with a color temperature of 65000K, and are suggesting that this will be bluish, so negative scans will be yellowish.

My problem is that if true, doesn't that make their scanner useless?

6500° Kelvin is known as "daylight" illumination (colour temperature) and nearly all image sensors are optimised for 6500°K white point. 6500°K is equivalent to the colour that you will see if you step outside on a clear day at noon, hold a white sheet of paper out in front of you and let the unfiltered sunlight reflect off the sheet of *white* paper. Step into a shadow and let the light of the clear blue sky reflect off the same *white* sheet of paper and you will see a higher white point colour temperature -- maybe, oh, 7800° Kelvin.

Back in the late 1800s, Lord Kelvin came up with his colour temperature scale by heating iron rods up to ridiculously high temperatures -- probably scaring away what few friends he had left by the time he was obtaining 8000° Kelvin.

If you print a colour negative in a darkroom, using conventional printing methods (an enlarger), you will actually use a green-ish filter pack between the negative and the light source. The green-ish filter is used to counter the orange-ish base colour that is typical of the vast majority of colour negative "print" films, so that whites will print as white (this is assuming that the scene is a daylight balanced scene).

 

[Corvair]

I guess we're back online??? Anyway...

We have Photoshop, and the cast is bad enough to make complete correction very difficult (beyond my patience, in other words).

It sounds like you are essentially wasting your time with that image. You'll never be able correct it.

Presuming that your display monitor is operating reasonably, you are going to have to start off by scanning a greyscale test image from negative film to calibrate your scanner. Once your scanner is able to acquire (in at least 24-bit colour) a greyscale sweep or step image from film as a neutral greyscale, then you will be able to scan imagery that will not require much more than a minor tonal or contrast tweak.

If your scanner can acquire imagery with at least 12-bit accuracy (that's 4096 shades of grey), your scanner should be able to cope with any lookup table adjustments that you do to achieve neutral scans. (In a nutshell: You want your SCANNER to perform as much of the initial colour correction as possible.)

 

[Corvair]

...I've worked with some publishing-quality processing equipment (made by a company called Lucht...

I've actually been to Lucht / Bremson's factory in Kansas (it's a long secret story as to why). Anyway, I believe they are now owned by a German company called Gretag Imaging. Lucht used to have a purpose-built SGI-based photographic image retouching and correction workstation many years ago that worked quite well. Unfortunately, it wasn't really worth the price they were asking.

Film scanners that I've worked with on a regular basis in recent years have been Kodak's various RFS-3570 model line, Imacon Flextite models, Imacon Progression scanners, Kodak HR-500, and some special Oxberry rollfilm scanners. Going back in time a bit: I've worked with Kodak ProPhotoCD scanning systems, Leaf 45, Nikon AF-4500, Kodak 2035, earlier Nikon Coolscan 35 models, uhhh... Scanmate large format drum scanners, maybe something else that I don't recall at this moment.

 

[Mercutio]

Small world. I got the distinct impression that Lucht doesn't sell new equipment all that often.

 

[Corvair]

Small world. I got the distinct impression that Lucht doesn't sell new equipment all that often.

If you're talking about digital (i.e. -- computer-based), yes. Otherwise, they definitely sell plenty of conventional photographic hardware, or at least they did at one time.

I really haven't dealt with Lucht in many years, but they used to make many different and popular models of automatic photo printers.

 

[time]

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions, including Ian (who I badgered by email). I have 'solved' my yellow cast problem.

The Epson twain software supports three different methods of preview color correction. I was pursuing this angle by fiddling with everything I could find in that area, when the scans started coming out green - not just a cast, but green monochrome!

Nothing I subsequently did affected it one iota. Scans remained steadfastly green. I examined all the twain parameter info, but nothing was out of place.

And then I found the button buried on the last page of the configuration options: "Reset all twain settings".

This closed the application. When I retsarted it and tried a scan, it took me a while to realize that not only was it not green, it wasn't yellow either.

I must be a genius? :roll:

From what I can see, at least one or two other people on the net have had the same problem. Pity Epson didn't suggest it. Bigger pity that their software has such a nasty bug. It makes the other annoying aspects of the software harder to bear.

To sum up, I would not recommend the "Photo" option on the Epson 1250. Even without the yellow, its ability to accurately reproduce colors from negatives is weak, and the chip it uses makes it the only Epson scanner incompatible with the excellent software that Ian recommended (which actually understands film types etc).

There's a guy on the net who's demonstrated reasonable results from a 1650 Photo, but it's still heaps harder to use than a dedicated film scanner, and must be excrutiatingly slow (I know the 1250 is).

 

[Pradeep]

To sum up, I would not recommend the "Photo" option on the Epson 1250. Even without the yellow, its ability to accurately reproduce colors from negatives is weak, and the chip it uses makes it the only Epson scanner incompatible with the excellent software that Ian recommended (which actually understands film types etc).

What software is it that Ian recommended?

Thanks, Pradeep.

 

[theSwede]

To sum up, I would not recommend the "Photo" option on the Epson 1250. Even without the yellow, its ability to accurately reproduce colors from negatives is weak, and the chip it uses makes it the only Epson scanner incompatible with the excellent software that Ian recommended (which actually understands film types etc).

There's a guy on the net who's demonstrated reasonable results from a 1650 Photo, but it's still heaps harder to use than a dedicated film scanner, and must be excrutiatingly slow (I know the 1250 is).

I guess the scanner software recommended by Ian was either Silverfast (http://www.silverfast.com) or VueScan (http://www.hamrick.com). Both are great stuff for 'making a better job than the supplied twain driver'.

May I ask for a link to the guy who got reasonable results from the 1650 Photo? I have that model and I have not had any good results while scanning negatives.

 

[time]

Hmm, sorry, it's a 1640, not a 1650, and they're not the same thing:

http://mypage.direct.ca/c/cyuill/photography_area/pages/epson1640sup_vs_photocd.htm

And you're right, it was VueScan: http://www.hamrick.com/vsm.html