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An acquired taste by Tim Daly, from Ag29 |
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First in a three-part series by Tim Daly examining film and print scanning techniques. Scanning your precious originals is no different to developing conventional photographic film, with high levels of concentration required to control image contrast and density. It is possible to salvage poor scans later on with software trickery, but it is far better to have a sound grasp of all underlying principles to prevent any errors at all. With such a wide variety of innate differences between black and white and transparency material - excluding personal variations in exposure and density - originals can be a challenge to acquire, even before you get to the creative bit. Like over or underdeveloped film, a bad scan will need careful software massaging which, in turn could stretch and posterise your tonal range and severely limit the later and more interesting creative processes. Now that even budget-price scanners provide exceptional quality image capture, there is a wide range of devices to choose from. Flatbed and film scanners are fitted with a strip of light-sensitive detector cells that work much like the individual cells in an insect’s eye. Each of these electronic ‘eyes’ creates an individual pixel in the resulting digital image and the more cells your device has, the bigger print you can make. The number of cells is indicated by the resolution of the scanner and that can be seen as its ability to capture fine detail. A 600dpi (dots per inch, but much better remembered as pixels per inch, or ppi) flatbed scanner, for instance, will have 600 individual sensors running across the width of the bed and a 1200dpi device has twice as many. With specifications rising each year, it is reassuring to know that even the lowly 600ppi flatbed will detect more than enough information from photographic print originals for desktop digital printing. Unlike the state-of-the-art digital cameras, where high resolution comes with a hefty price tag, flatbed scanners offer a much more cost-effective way to get into digital photography. . Next Page >> |
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• Preset scanner settings often present the user with more trouble than they are worth. In this example the same image was scanned as follows: top left: no presets; top right: Auto ‘exposure’ ; bottom left: matched to an Epson 870 preset; bottom right:matched to an Epson 1200 preset. © Tim Daly Page 1 0f 6 |
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