Trouble scanning matte prints & color negatives. (Using Microtek)

My microtek 9800XL with scanwizard is having trouble scanning prints of my photographs that are on matte photo paper. The texture of the paper catches light and there end up being tiny little white spots scattered all over the image! This never happened with my old crappy HP scanner. It seems like this microtek is almost TOO good! Picking up detail and light that the other didn't see. OR this scanner sucks and I'm doomed.

Anyone know how I can avoid this, other than scanning from the negatives instead. Which brings me to my other problem.

The scanner does a great job of scanning chromes, an even better job with b/w negs, but it won't remove the orange from my color negatives or does so so terribly that everything still looks very blue! Any suggestions on how to get that orange layer stripped? I see it works great with silverfast, but I only have the demo of that program so far. I'm sure it can be done and I'm doing something wrong.

Please help!
Thanks.

Try Vuescan. What you need to be able to do is pick a film profile, that will allow for removing the base cast of the film.

D.

Thanks. After reading a few more threads on the subject I found Vuescan and downloaded the demo. I'll try that tonight.

Any opinions on Vuescan vs. Silverfast. Vuescan is so much cheaper!

Thanks.
J

If you bought a 9800XL through official channels, it will have Silverfast with it. Check your software disks.

Silverfast is vastly better than Vuescan, although the differences may not be obvious on some scans. On difficult scans, SF always produces a better result.

---Michael

Well, I got mine on ebay and the disks were not included. I have a friend who I suspect has the disk so maybe i'll install his version of silverfast. I used the demo and it's really incredible. I used the vuescan demo and was less than impressed. Maybe it's just that the demo version is so severely crippled in it's interface, but I wasn't so impressed. For now I'll just scan color negs as positives and adjust the colors manually. I'll figure it out soon enough.

So, any tips on scanning matte prints? I really don't want to have prints made on glossy paper.

Unfortunately, textured paper will often show the texture of the paper in the scan. I haven't found any way to mitigate that, other than scanning at a low enough resolution to avoid the issue. That works well if you're scanning for the web.

You can try scanning at a higher resolution and then downsampling, but I doubt it'll gain you much.

Play with resolutions and up/down sampling if PS. You may find a sequence that works well for the prints that you have.

Also, make sure that Scanwizard is not setting your white point too low, which will blow the texture into white specks. Make sure that the scanner is working properly as well. If you got it on Ebay, that could be a problem...


---Michael

I'll look into the white point issue. That sounds like the problem. The scanner is doing a great job with colors and all sorts of formats. It's just that speckled pattern from matte paper which I'm not super surprised by since my old crappy scanner was probably just not getting as much detail as this one. It did show the pattern a bit, but not as white speckles.

Thanks again everyone for your help.

jonathanbennett120 said:

Well, I got mine on ebay and the disks were not included. I have a friend who I suspect has the disk so maybe i'll install his version of silverfast. I used the demo and it's really incredible. I used the vuescan demo and was less than impressed. Maybe it's just that the demo version is so severely crippled in it's interface, but I wasn't so impressed. For now I'll just scan color negs as positives and adjust the colors manually. I'll figure it out soon enough.

Click to expand...

You're right about the demo version of Vuescan. When I tried - years ago - it was hideous. Although, I was able to get very nice scans using the full version.
When I bought my new Microtek, I tried the Silverfast and liked that a lot. Except that the version that comes with the scanner is pretty light-weight.
I eventually popped for the full version of Silverfast and am very, very happy I did. It really has been worth the $$$.
Regards,
Tom

Tom, you are not the first person to say that about Silverfast. I'm sure eventually I'll end up with the full version.

Silverfast came with my plustek OpticFilm 7200. Truly horrible software. Switched to VueScan and it's so much better.

I'm dismayed that hardware vendors don't provide software that's adequate for the job on hand.

It's certainly worth upgrading from Silverfast SE to Ai. One of the main benefits is that it enables you to scan in at 48 bits, with 48 bit output. Then you need a version of photoshop that allows you to work with 16 bits per channel, (CS2 does, not sure about CS). That's the trouble with digital....there's no end to upgrades etc etc....As for "adequate for the job on hand" I suppose that's subject to definition and for a lot of people it would be...

p.s. I haven't worked out how to get rid of distracting elements from certain papers either, so can't help there, apart from making sure you have switched off any auto sharpening which will only exaggerate them.

Re: definition for adequate for the job on hand. Point well taken. I guess what comes to mind is this -- I just purchased a ScanMaker i800, that comes with ScanWizard Pro, and the software implies that it will let you set the dynamic range. It opens a dialog box that displays a histogram, and provides sliders that let you alter the relationship between input and output densities. Except they don't work -- the density remains the same.

When I posted a question about this, the suggestion was to upgrade software. OK, but it gets under my skin that the vendor isn't providing what I would think are the basic tools for using the equipment.

See my latest post to you on how to .....

Not adequate for the job is silverfast, which came with my scanner. I sure hope that silverfast dies a painful death.

You need to make a distinction between Silverfast Ai which comes oackaged with a few of the more expensive prosumer scanners (Epson V750Pro, Microtek 1800f, etc.) and is a very powerful, fully functional package that outperforms the Epson, Micortek and VueScan software and .... Silverfast SE which comes bundled with most other prosumer scanners and has only a few of the features of Ai. Generally the Microtek, Epsonor VueSan will outperform SE.