One thing about slides is that they generally scan darker than the
originals, particularly if your scanner doesn't have exposure controls (mine
Acer doesn't). Therefore, slides that look great when projected may look 1-2
stops under when scanned. Raw scans in particular will be that dark, or
darker.
I've found that PS's Adjust/Auto Levels brings 2/3ds of them up to a very
workable image. The other 1/3 can bring on problems, "noise" in particular.
Vuescan will usually get 80% of those into a workable (or at least
acceptable) range, and the few remaining take a lot of work.
Another problem could be color space. I was surprised to find that
re-installing PS changed my adjusted monitor colors (Dell Trinitron), and I
*thought* I was getting 1-3 stops under--this time from negs. Switching to
sRGB ( I can almost hear the cries of "EEuww! Yech!") solved most of that
problem, though the tonal range is admittedly narrower.
I'll admit that I do very limited print-out, since my target is
general-purpose archiving to CD, not repro-quality tiffs or PSD. You have a
dual problem, in that the color space of your work computer may not be the
same as your home computer, and it's impossible to compare them
side-by-side. The one *shouldn't* affect the other, especially if you're
saving raw scans. But give the settings a closer look.
I don't know if that's any help or not. :-)
Best regards--LRA
On March 25, 2001 tmaugham@erols.com wrote:
>I'm fairly new to the digital darkroom scene and am having some
difficulty getting what I think should be good scans. I am using a
Canon FS2710 with the canon scanning software invoked via TWAIN from PS
6.0 on a computer at my place of employment. I burn the images (PSD
files) to a cd then load them on my PC at home (which also uses PS 6.0)
and make any adjustments and do the printing there. I notice that all
of my images are at least 2 stops too dark and the colors not nearly as
vibrant as on the original Ektachrome slides. I am not making any
adjustments whatsoever during the scanning process, is that my problem?
Should I be making some adjustments in the scanning software prior to
saving the image in PS or ??? Also, I doubt that the monitor on the
office PC is correctly balanced (it's pretty old), would that make a
difference?
Thanks for any help!
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