Scanning Properly

Recently, I needed to do a bunch of scanning of old photographs for my wife's mother's memorial. I had always been disatisfied with the totally inadequate performance of my HP d135's scanning capabilities. This soley due to the garbage software it comes with. The windows software is almost worse, and an aftermarket alternative software that I had tried (Art-Scan 5) always seemed to crash things or work funky.

So I say, "That's it. I'm buying a new scanner!" I had owned an HP Scanjet scanner in the past, but I had also been really let down by the software, so I decided that HP was out. I knew that Epson had fairly decent software as my scanner at work had that, but it seemed that Epson was really falling behind in the market these days.

After shopping it through, I decided on a Canon Canoscan 8600F. A $170 scanner that promises slide and negative scanning (surely not as nice as a real slide scanner, but something).

This desision was made for 3 reasons:

• My purchases in the last year of a ton of camera gear centered around a Canon 30D DSLR frame.
• Canon's a solid force in the photocopy image world. (This hopefully atesting to the hardware)
• The product seemed more solid than most others I looked at.

My prayer was that the software would be at least much better than the HP garbage. I was rewarded. I am not claiming that the Canon ScanGear software is the best scanning software in the world, but at least I can say that it is truely useful for REAL world scanning.

48 Bit Scanning

This is the business. Again. Image was sampled fromt the scanner at 600x430 (48 bit) with some processing at the scanner, some process in photoshop (levels again), then resampled to 600 pixels wide. Note how much is left to work with.




The image adjusted with levels.