Photo Scanner App
Lahoma Helmy
I, too, held on to heaps of meaningful photos that added absolutely no value to my life because they were hidden away, and the prospect of dealing with them seemed daunting, overwhelming, not worth the hassle. So I let them sit in the attic, the cupboard, the garage.
I used a negative that I know that I missed the focus point on. However, with a loupe we could see that the focus was good enough and this will not have any bearing in the calibration. The image was shot with a Hasselblad 202FA with the 110mm f/2 lens set at f/4. Exposure time was 1/500. The film was Ilford HP5+ rated at 250 ISO and developed in Ilford Perceptol 1:3.
My printer told me that he does not apply any sharpening to the raw scans as the Flextight is so good that all sharpening does is to accentuate the grain. When you look at a 100% crop from the above image you can understand this (better if you click to see the full size version):
However, having seen the Flextight scan I realise I need to apply a little sharpening to the raw scan as part of the processing workflow when resizing for the web and such. So the calibration here is to figure out what level of sharpening will bring the raw v700 scan close to the Flextight scan.
Oh, the image next to the print is a 50x70cm enlargement from the Fuji X100T and at the same time as having the above image printed I had a 60x90cm print made from another x100t image and it looks great. I also had some 120cm wide prints made from XPan negatives, which have quite large grain despite being shot on Pan F.
About the author: Lee Johnson is a photographer and a software developer based in Switzerland. You can find more of his work on his website, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This article was also published here.
I am trying to install a USB HP photo scanner 1000. On the back it says C9900A. My windows 10 laptop finds the scanner and it scans the photo the first time and puts the file in a folder, but from there on I can not scan anything. It actually scans but I can never find the scanned file unless I remove the scanner from the USB port and start over and then it scans one photo in to the same folder. Any help would be great.
The HP 1000 will connect as a removeable drive that will only save one scan at a time. After scanning one image you will have to move it out of the scanner folder to another location. To get around this you can use image acquiring software like ACDC or the little app MiniScan. If the below link doesn't work just search for HP 1000 Miniscan.
The higher the optical resolution, the finer the detail that can be seen by the scanner. An obvious comparison - a scanner with a 3200 dpi optical resolution isn't as good as one with a 6400 dpi optical resolution.
The higher the density range (D-Max), the better the scanner can see and capture specular highlight and shadow detail. Less obvious to most people - a D-Max of 4.0 is considered perfect. Some scanners can go higher than that, but then you're usually talking about true (and very expensive) PMT drum scanners.
Like the Richter scale, D-Max is a logarithmic measurement. While a D-Max of 3.4 doesn't sound bad compared to 4.0, it's actually huge. The lower value is okay (not great) for reflective scans, but is horrible for negatives and positive film (slides and transparencies). What will happen on that 3.4 scanner is shadows will fill in with random black pixels where you can see detail in the film. Near white values will simply blow out to white. That because the 3.4 scanner can't tell the difference black and near black, or white and near white, so it assigns them all the same value. Roughly, anything that would be 85% black or darker will fill in as solid black. Anything about 5% gray or lighter will become white.
Ignore all resolution measurements you see like 6400 x 9600. The second number is meaningless. It's still 6400 dpi no matter what. The higher number is simply the length of the glass area being half again as long as the width.
When we closed our business, we sold our Creo Eversmart Supreme II. I had no interest in lugging around a 150 pound commercial level scanner in retirement. But, I also wanted something as a replacement that could come at least close to its scanning capability. After looking at every currently available flatbed scanner (meaning, still being made and supported, not just you can buy one and hope it works), the only scanner that compared is the Epson V850.
The scanning software that comes with the V850 works, but is generously described as garbage. Very few controls. I tried VueScan with it, and while that also worked, it was also highly simplified. Not the kind of control I was used to with the Creo's oXYgen Scan software. The V850 comes with a base version of SilverFast. While it took a while to get used to, it didn't take me long to decide to purchase the higher level upgrade to get the extra pro controls.
That depends on what your needs are. I would look at VueScan (software) they make great software that works with a lot of scanners. I've been using it for years. VueScan is Sonoma compatible but maybe the scanner's included software isn't.
If you want to make scanning your own photos fit into your busy and hectic life, I think my experience here might give you an idea how much time will be involved and how many photos you can easily get through.
Turns out I was right about starting slow. In my defense though, it was my first day back scanning after some time. But by 9:39 a.m., about 45 minutes after I started, I had only scanned what seemed like a pathetic 10 paper prints!
This makes me happy because really, I had a pretty average to almost poor first week. Seriously. I mean it was my first week back and I was a bit rusty. I had problems remembering my scanning techniques I had used over the last year or so. Also, I was doing some testing to figure out how to be the most efficient while scanning and removing dust from my slides. And on top of that I was sick.
Yet, I still managed to scan 161 photos in an average of around 3 minutes a piece. And most of those were slides and not prints. Slides take a scanner longer to scan than paper prints because of the higher resolution you have to scan them with.
I am finishing up a major photo scanning project. My mother passed a few months ago and I got the task of digitizing her stash of family memorabilia. It did not all wind up in Gramps, but certainly some of it got there.
A VERY old Umax Astra 1220s. This is a SCSI interface flatbed scanner at least 25 years old. Slow, but it works. I used this to scan a bunch of 2 inch by 2 inch photos which I think originated as 120-format film. I also used it for newspaper clippings that could not go through the Fujitsu scanner and some odd-size stuff.
A Fujitsu ScanSnap 5500M. This lives on a USB interface. It is a document feeder and will scan front and back at the same time. I used it for photos printed in modern sizes such as 3.5x5, 4x6 etc. I could not put a stack on the sheet feeder, but it happily pulled them through one at a time. It only takes 3 or 4 seconds to scan a photo. I was feeding and clicking steadily. This scanner also happily pulled through postcards.
A Xonos film scanner. This is a stand-alone device that scans to an SD memory card. It can handle all 35mm formats. Supposedly it handles 8mm and 110 as well. I found 110 film very hard to feed through.
Amazon has dozens of different brands of these devices.
Software tools: Gwenview, exiftool, xsane, pdfunite, convert, pdfsandwich, tesseract and some others. I used convert to combine JPG files so that front and back are in one image. Pdfunite does the same thing for PDF files. Pdfsandwich and tesseract are optical character recognition tools. Exiftool embeds comments and captions directly in JPG (and other format) image files.
59fb9ae87f