Scanning printed material

The primary function of a flatbed scanner is to scan documents, photographs and other printed material. So before I move on to film scanning I am going to take a detailed look at the Professional Mode for reflective scanning - I will start the film scanning section on Friday 10th March.

Professional Mode

Anyone who has used EpsonScan software will be familiar with this updated version, there are a few extra features which I will take a closer look at. The control panel is very long (938 pixels) so I will break it up for clarity.

The top section allows you to save your custom settings, the only problem with this is, that it automatically gives your custom settings a name, Setting 3 doesn't mean a thing to me. Surely being able to add your own name would be a basic requirement.

The next section is where you define the type of document, source and Exposure type. There are three choices for document type; Reflective, Film (with Film holder) and Film ( with Film area guide). The document source only has one option Document Table, despite having a drop down list. The Auto Exposure Type has two choices, Photo and Document. When you select the Film a film Type drop down list appears which has three choices; Positive Film , Colour Negative Film and B&W Negative Film.

The Destination section is where you select the image size and quality. The top drop down list includes 48 & 24 bit colour and colour smoothing, for greyscale there are two choices 16 & 8 bit greyscale and a Black and White setting - (for line work). The scanning quality has two choices, Best and Draft. Resolution starts at 50 dpi and ends at 12800 dpi. The maximum optical resolution that the V700 can handle is 4800 dpi, anything above that is interpolated resolution - which I would not recommend using. The scans on page 4 would generate a file size of 4.99 Gb at 4800dpi or 35.50 Gb at 12800 dpi. You would only use reflective scanning at 4800 dpi if you wanted to scan in a very small portion of a document/photo and needed an enlargement from it.

The Document size gives you the selected area of the scan, this would alter if you cropped etc. The target size has numerous size options from thumbnail (80 x 120) through to A3. However, you can't create a thumbnail from of a large image, you get an Out of Range warning. You should make sure there isn't a marquee on the preview window and then click on the thumbnail size (or any other) and a proportional marquee appears on the preview window, now you can resize this to fit your scan and the resulting scan will be the exact dimension chosen - hope you understood that. The best option is to scan to the original size and create your thumbnails in your image editing application, or up the scale if you need to create a large print.

The trimming option gives priority to the document size when Off is selected, when you select On the target size is given priority over the Document size - confused? well here is the Epson Help guide explanation

"You can specify whether the document size or the target size is given preference when determining the output size. When you select Off, the document size is given preference over the target size. Therefore, changes in the target size are based on the ratio of the document size or the marquee size. If the target size is locked, the scale value does not exceed the target size. When you select On, the target size is given preference over the document size. Therefore, the scale value is based on the ratio of the target size." Still confused?

The last section is for image adjustments. The first button (top left) is the Auto Exposure, just click on this and the scan will appear 90% correct, if not then click on the Reset button and try the Histogram correction (Levels), Tone Correction (Curves), Image adjustment or Colour Palette.

Histogram	Tone Correction
Image Adjustment	Colour Palette
Colour palette in action

The EpsonScan software gives plenty of scope for fine tuning your scans and better still the preview is updated instantly with your new adjustment. I have never had any problems using EpsonScan on previous Epson scanners and so far it seems to be working just as well.

A new item is the Colour Palette, make a selection and sample a point this adds the colour to the bottom list, now you should be able to match the selected colours to another part of the image. Well, you can but everything within the selected area takes on the colour. This would seem to be OK if your just making rectangular or square selections, but the help guide implies that you can match skin tones etc, great but my wife is not Lego brick shaped. I will experiment further with this, but so far I am not that impressed with the Colour Palette, it has undertones of the Gray-Balancer software,

Moving on quickly, the Unsharp Mask Filter has three settings; Low, Medium and High. The best setting is Off and apply USM in Photoshop.

No USM	USM set to LOw
USM set to Medium	USM set to High

The De screening filter removes Moire patterns from printed materials, there are four settings; General. Newspaper 85 lpi, Magazine 133 lpi and Fine Print 175 lpi.

Selecting the Colour restoration box forces the scanner to correct any faults in colours, on my sample scan it removed the nostalgic sepia tone. Digital ICE works on prints and in Standard mode it made a good attempt on my picture, using the High setting made a total mess of the picture. In all fairness this is probably due to the small photograph rather than any shortcomings on the scanner.

Colour restoration	Digital ICE works on prints
Digital ICE - Standard	Digital ICE - High - oooops

At the very bottom of the EpsonScan panel is the Preview button, this has two options, Thumbnail and Normal. The Thumbnail mode will auto select any images on the Platen and the Normal mode displays the entire surface, leaving you to decide how you want your crops etc. Changing between modes causes the preview to be lost, fortunately it only takes about seven seconds for a new preview to be generated. Once you are satisfied with all your settings you can press the Scan button. If you are scanning from within an image editing application then the image is opened in the work area with a name Untitled-1, pity there isn't an option to give a custom name to the scan.

Thumbnail mode preview	Normal mode preview

 

I will do some more print and document scanning later in the review, but I suspect the majority of readers will want to see how the V700 performs with film scanning. I will dedicate the whole of Friday 10th March to film scanning. Now where is my bottle of Optrex.

Please use the forum to post your questions - links on the bottom of each page and on the left column.