slides come out very dark

[grant walker]

Hi,
I am using an Epson 4990 to scan some of my parents slides (I think they
are 35 ml? 8 fit in the holder.) The slides look dark on the monitor and
print very dark, I have no trouble with any other types of scanning coming
out dark.

Should I sort the slides into groups of lighter and darker before I scan
them, or adjust the brightness while scanning, or do the adjustments in my
image editor?

Are there any tips or tricks I should be aware of when scanning slides?

tia,
Grant.
.... and my Father thanks you too...

 

[tomm42]

Hi,
I am using an Epson 4990 to scan some of my parents slides (I think they
are 35 ml? 8 fit in the holder.) The slides look dark on the monitor and
print very dark, I have no trouble with any other types of scanning coming
out dark.

Should I sort the slides into groups of lighter and darker before I scan
them, or adjust the brightness while scanning, or do the adjustments in my
image editor?

Are there any tips or tricks I should be aware of when scanning slides?

tia,
Grant.
... and my Father thanks you too...

1st use the Epson Pro level of their software.
2nd a properly exposed slide is generally 1/2 stop underexposed so it
is a little dark with more intense color, scanners don't like these
slides. Adjustments can be made.
Click on the graph symbol on in the pro section of the Epson software.
There is a pull down menu of small changes you can make, Lighter (the
one you want), darker, more/less contrast. click on each slide
separately and use the lighter setting, each slide has to be adjusted
separately, but the changes are sticky as long as the selection box
remains. If the lighter setting is not enough, notice the curve is
above the dividing line. 1st thing to do is to click on the point on
the upper right of the curve, drag it out about half of the first box,
a little goes a long way, see how that does, if still not enough, drag
out the center point a little, this should do it. The representation on
the preview isn't 100% accurate but close. Save this setting lighten
more is a good name.
Click on each slide and use this for adjustment, if lighten works,
that's fine too. The setting remains with the selection box.

Tom

 

[-]

Tom gave you some great information. One thing I would add is that if you
are relying on the software to auto crop and auto compute the slide
"exposure" settings, auto cropping is often fooled and miscrops. When it
does this, it can include or exclude areas of the actual slide image. This
can cause the auto computation of the exposure settings to be off,
especially if it is including areas with lots of white or black from the
slide mount. If you manually crop down to just the area of the image (or
portion of the image you want), auto exposure will be much more accurate.
Here is a link to some instructions on how to manually crop and set up a
batch scan using EpsonScan:

http://www.betterscanning.com/scanning/batchscanning.html

Doug

 

[grant walker]

hi all,
thanks for the replies, i will try your suggestions and do a little more
reading.

regards,
grant.