Software for scanning prints - free if possible

[Roger Mills]

Sorry, I Googled for "canon canoscan 9000f mark ii manual" and didn't specifically notice that the manual I cited was only for the Mk 1.

And no, I haven't read all 334 pages - but I did notice that it looked basically similar to what came with my cheap and cheerful (£35) all-in-one printer/scanner a couple of years ago. Looks like a retrograde step if the "new improved" model is not so good as its predecessor.

"However", although it doesn't come with MP Navigator Ex (coming with Scan Utility and My Image Garden - whatever that is - instead) it *does* appear to come with ScanGear (according to

)

So it might be worth finding that and firing it up and - if necessary - referring to the appropriate part of the Mk 1 manual, because it will probably be very similar).

Incidentally, when you say that there's very little documentation, are you referring to hard copy printed stuff? You'll almost certainly find that most of the documentation will be in the form of an on-screen manual which will have been installed when you installed the driver, etc.

[David]

I am using ScanGear at the moment. It offers a maximum scan resolution of

1200 DPI.

I haven't yet investigated setting the "large scan" option.

The on-line (which means on the computer) manual tells you lots of trivial stuff but as far as I can tell it doesn't document much in the way of technical detail, and certainly doesn't explain anything about the resolutions supported by the drivers. Just says things like "Use the Advanced Mode tab to specify color mode, output resolution, image brightness, color tone, etc. when scanning." but doesn't discuss what resolutions are available.

It does say, for ScanGear in Advanced Mode

"Output Settings allows you to set the following items:

Output Resolution

Select the resolution to scan at.

The higher the resolution (value), the more detail in your image.

Select a resolution from the options displayed by clicking the button, or enter a value within the range of 25 dpi to 19200 dpi (in 1 dpi increments).

"

Which is a terminological inexactitude because if you try to enter anything above 1200 it tells you that the value is illegal and sets it to

1200.

I've tried ticking some boxes as recommended in another post but I still can't configure any resolution for scanning pictures above 1200 DPI.

Cheers

Dave R

[Johny B Good]

One thing to keep in mind with regard to scanning prints is that unless it's a contact print taken off a glass plate negative onto glossy paper, 600DPI is going to be 'overkill' in almost all cases.

For anything larger than a 5 x 4 inch print taken off 35mm film, even

300DPI will capture all the detail there is to be captured from such a print. What you mainly lose with a print is contrast ratio which will considerably ease the demands on a typical colour flatbed document scanner (24 bit colour?).

If possible, always try to scan from the original negatives or slides (colour or black and white), preferably with a high res 48 bit colour scanner where you'll need a resolution of 2400 to 3600 DPI to avoid too much loss of detail.

If your only source of material is print, the demands on the scanner are quite modest since you've already lost contrast information as well as a loss of linear resolution, this latter loss being ideally due to the enlargement of the original source negative or slide so not as real a loss of detail in the original negative/slide.

[Martin Brown]

What format are you saving them as and with what pixel dimensions?

Something doesn't add up here. Either you are saving low quality JPEGs or the images are tiny since even a humble 6x4 print or postcard at 1200 dpi would be 7k2x4k8 pixels 36Mpixels ~35MB as a highest quality JPEG. Blurred black cats in coal cellars and white ones in snowstorms excepted. That is about 6x the detail that a typical 35mm negative film can support (very slow films can do better).

A reasonable scan size for a 6x4 is around 600dpi if it is tack sharp or less if it isn't.

Check that the image quality is sufficient for your needs or you will have to do it all again. A rough heuristic is that for colour JPEGs average file size as a high quality JPEG is around 1byte/pixel and about half that for pure monochrome images.

[David]

You are right about strange things going on. The DPI count doesn't seem to make much difference to the file size. It still seems to come out around 4-5 Mb.

For instance I have a .jpg file which has the Image information that it is

12288 * 8320 pixels, vertical and horizontal resolution of 2400 dpi and bit depth of 24. Size 4.66 Mb.

I have another scan (from Paint, I think) of the same test picture which is reported as 6096 * 4128 1200 * 1200 dpi and 24 bit colour. Size is 4.08 Mb.

The Save quality setting in IrfanView is 80%.

The estimated size for 1200 dpi from the ScanGear driver/front end (supplied by Canon) is 73.12 Mb.

Scanning with IrfanView front ended by ScanGear is giving quite small file sizes - 1.69 Mb for 1200 * 1200 and 521 Kb for 600 * 600.

The 600 bpi file within the IrfanView program seems to be 18.28 Mb which matches the prediction in the ScanGear front end.

So something is happening during the automatic saving by the batch scanning process which is massively compressing the picture data.

Sigh!

More software configuration to bugger about with.

Cheers

Dave R

[David]

Well, a lot of progress has been made, and I am severely embarrassed.

Every DPI dialogue box I have tried to hand edit (non with drop down lists) has refused to change, but somehow I missed hand editing the box in the Advanced Mode tab of ScanGear, assuming that since the drop down list stopped at 1200 dpi then that was the maximum supported by the utility/ driver.

I now have established that it will select in 1 dot increments up to 1200 dpi but above that it rounds up to the next highest standard value - that is 1201 dpi rounds up to 2400 and 2401 rounds up to 4800.

IrfanView has proved a blessing for automating the bulk capture of prints but is managing to compress the image considerably which may remove any benefits from higher resolution scanning. Noted that there is a general view in this thread that scanning at high dpi for photographic prints confers little if any benefit (I am still pondering this).

So I am more pleased with my purchase than I was a day or so ago.

The utility/driver software can identify multiple prints on the scanner bed and treat them as individual scans when working with compatible software so I have my icing on the cake.

I am still bemused that Canon offer two different drivers - one with constraints over the resolution and another which supports the higher resolution. This is not really clear at the start from their documentation.

Anyway, thanks for all the help.

Cheers

Dave R

[fred]

In article , David writes

That would appear to be the raw image size 6096 x 4128 x 3 bytes (24bits per pixel) = 75M

Try setting the jpg quality to 100% to see if the file sizes match the predicted 1byte per pix suggested by another poster. If you are squishing at 80% then you will be dealing with some pic dependent unknowns which it would be best to eliminate for your size tests.

I'd suggest that scanning 1200 and squishing to 80% is a bit counter productive quality wise, 600 with 95-100% qual would preserve more detail.

[fred]

In article , David writes

Irfanview will only do what you tell it to do, jpg compression is configurable as previously mentioned at anything from 0-100% (quality), either from the options button in the pre-scan dialogue box or the or the JPEG/GIF settings box that opens every time you perform a File > Save\Save As operation. The setting is global.

[cl]

I *almost* suggested this might be the case when I read earlier discussion.

I agree with other comments here, scanning a *print* at anything more than around 600dpi is pointless. With negatives and slides you can probably go to the best the scanner can manage and then 'tune' it a bit to get the best compromise between image size and quality.

[David]

Out of interest, if you want (for some reason) to scan a small print then blow it up four or five times, is it better to scan at a higher DPI (which will then presumably scale one to one with pixels on a printer or display) or scan at a lower DPI then use software to "stretch" the picture (presumably by guessing what the extra pixels might look like from those immediately adjacent).

Or do both give much the same result?

Cheers

Dave R

[Roger Mills]

You won't get exactly the same result because interpolation is only a guess, as opposed to actually "seeing" the fine detail. In theory at any rate - scanning at a higher resolution should give better results. It's unlikely to make things worse. Whether or not it is actually better will depend on the effective resolution of the print which, in turn, will depend on the chemistry of the film and its processing.

[Peter Johnson]

You don't need to install software just to rotate images, use Windows Explorer. Just select the images, right click and select rotate left or right to choice. It works with the standard Windows selection commands as well.

[Roger Mills]

Well, if you want to rotate it by 90 degrees, yes. But the previous poster was talking about *fine* rotation - e.g. 1.75 degrees to make the horizon horizontal. Can Windows Explorer *really* do that?

[Johny B Good]

The former. You want to extract as much detail from a small print, that was either a contact print or just a very slight enlargement of the original negative, which may well contain much finer detail than the more usual size of print.

An unusually small print has every possibility of containing almost as much detail as an 10 by 8 print so is worth scanning at higher than normal resolutions (say 1200 or even 2400 dpi), even if it's only to do a test scan to check whether such unusually high detail exists.

Scanning at 'normal' 600dpi followed by software enlargement will, at best, only result in a rather indifferent image quality.

[mail-veil]

A superb feature that I have only found in ScanSoft's PaperPort is being able to drag a line through two points you want to be horizontal and release and the image is redrawn with excellent precision.

[David]

Either the Canon software or IrfanView (can't remember which) claims to automatically straighten the image if it is a few degrees out.

Presumably by checking the alignment of the edges of the print.

Current challenge is that the Canon software doesn't seem to have the concept of a network printer. If you try and configure the "Copy" function it only offers local printers (that is, just the 'soft' Fax and Microsoft XPS Document Writer) and won't print from My Image Garden because there is no printer configured. All in all not the easiest software package to use.

Cheers

Dave R

[David Livingstone]

In message , David writes

may help