Scanning Prints, Please Help

[BlueEarth]

Hello,

I am currently attempting to scan numerous old photographs with the intention of digitizing them and printing copies for family members. I am not a photography buff or someone who has specialized knowledge in this field, but I am posing this question here in the hopes that the photography experts on this forum can offer some help. I assume that even though this is a photography forum, that many people here have experience with scanners and scanning prints.

I'm trying to keep my budget relatively low for this project, so I started out by purchasing a printer/scanner all-in-one, the Canon Pixma MP280. It's not professional equipment and I don't expect photo lab quality results. But I read good reviews of the MP280 and thought based on the reviews that I would try it out and see if it was good enough for my needs.

I am scanning most photos at either 300 or 600 dpi. I've tried both resolutions. The scanner does not appear to be picking up all the details in the photographs at either resolution. The image appears degraded, like the details are blurred to some extent.

I wondered what a photo lab quality scan would look like, so I took the same photograph that I had scanned at home to a photo lab and had them scan it. The quality of the photo lab scan was much better, all the details were really picked up in the scan.

The thing that is strange is that when I got the photo lab scan back, the file was a 400 kilobyte jpeg file and the file properties says it's only 96 dpi horizonal and vertical resolution. The scans that I have been doing at home are way bigger than that, they are like 30 megabytes, at least the 600 dpi scans are. Why would the photo lab scan be so much better in quality when the file size is so small and the resolution is so small compared to the scans that I have been doing at home? I thought that higher resolution yields a better scan? By the way, I scanned the same photo at home at approx. 96 dpi and the quality was absolutely horrible. What is going on here?

This Canon MP280 prints 4 x 6 photos very well if the digital image is high quality to begin with. For example, I printed a 4 x 6 of a digital photo that I found online, and the quality was exceptional. It was indistinguishable to me from a photo lab print. So I am confident that the printer on this machine will perform the task of printing high quality prints, so long as the original digital image is high quality. But I want to know why the scan quality is so poor and what I can do about it. Because I'm getting poor scans, so that is causing the print-outs to be poor quality as well.

I may have to buy a new scanner, but I don't know why I should have to. The scan resolution on the Canon MP280 goes up to 1200 x 2400 dpi, and most of the prints that I will be scanning will be scanned at 300 or 600 dpi, because from what I have read, it is pointless to scan prints at a higher resolution than 300 or 600 dpi because there is no more detail in a typical print than what you get at 300 dpi. It seems like overkill to buy a scanner with 4800 x 4800 resolution when all I'm doing is scanning prints that were probably printed at no more than 300 dpi. Why are my scans at 300 and 600 dpi not picking up all the details and colors in the original prints?

Any help would be appreciated. I will stay around to participate if anyone has more questions.

 

[clanthar]

You're not entirely clear about scan and/or image dpi. The resolution of a scan is meaningless without the size. For example, a 300 dpi, 3.4 x 2.5 inch image has only half the resolution of a 100 dpi, 20 x 15 inch image. We require higher res scanners when our intention is to scan a smaller original and output a larger print. So if your original is a 3x4 print and you want the final result to be an 8x10 300 dpi print you must scan the 3x4 at 750 dpi. 8x10 at 300 dpi is the same thing as 3x4 at 750 dpi.

This should explain the confusion about the lab scan you received at 96 dpi. It does not explain why you're not getting good scans from the hardware you bought. Double check the software controls on your scanner and make sure your output dpi is correct for the output size. You're right in that you don't need resolution beyond 300 dpi for the output. You don't even need that as the printer you have isn't capable of handling it. 200 dpi for your output should be enough.

Your problem may have nothing to do with resolution. It could be the overall quality of the scanner or even a defective scanner.

Joe

 

[Proteus617]

Hello,
I am not a photography buff or someone who has specialized knowledge in this field,

Well, you are about to become a photography buff and gain specialized knowledge if you want to succeed. I started with a pixma and it's good enough for a start. First, you need to learn how to use the scanner. Good print quality is 300 DPI and you want to scan at least 2x-4x that resolution. Scan as a Tiff and learn to use your scanner software to manually crop each photo in preview then adjust the histogram. Once you have a digital file, open in an image manipulation program, adjust levels etc, sharpen, clone out the junk, resize to your final resolution, convert to JPEG, final sharpen...more than one way to skin the cat. The superior look of the "pro scans" probably had more to do with the autocorrect that your lab used on your files than on the quality of their equipment.

 

[BlueEarth]

Those are good suggestions. Thank you. I have tried changing the settings on the scanning software to see if it makes the scan any clearer, but it doesn't really. Certainly I can change the colors, the contrast, brightness, etc. And I can blur, sharpen, etc. the image after the scan with photo editing. But I can't get the detail from the original photo. Everything just looks kind of degraded. I am scanning mostly 4 x 6 prints at either 300 or 600 dpi, and printing only 4 x 6 printouts.

The way I see it, if I scan a 4 x 6 print at 300 dpi and print that scanned image at 4 x 6, it should not have any problems with resolution. I'm not changing the size of the image. It would seem to me that all the detail of the original image should be preserved in the scan and reproduced in the final printout. But that's not what I'm getting.

It is frustrating. I've been dealing with it for a few days. I almost want to just go buy a new scanner, a higher quality scanner made specifically for scanning photos, just to see how it compares to mine. But then again I just bought this Pixma MP280 this week. The strange thing is all the reviews that I read about the Pixma MP280 said that the scan quality was superb, better than the print quality. But what I'm experiencing is that the print quality is better than the scan quality. And the print quality on this is very good so long as the digital image that it is printing is high quality. I wish I knew what to do.

 

[Big Mike]

Welcome to the forum.

FYI...by scanning and printing photographs that you did not take, you are likely violating the copyright.

 

[clanthar]

... I am scanning mostly 4 x 6 prints at either 300 or 600 dpi, and printing only 4 x 6 printouts.

The way I see it, if I scan a 4 x 6 print at 300 dpi and print that scanned image at 4 x 6, it should not have any problems with resolution. I'm not changing the size of the image. It would seem to me that all the detail of the original image should be preserved in the scan and reproduced in the final printout. But that's not what I'm getting.

You're thinking correctly. If you're not re-sizing the scans and you're scanning at 300 dpi then you're correct to assume the scan should capture the full detail of the original. One other concern occurs to me. If your originals are prints with a textured surface -- luster or semi-gloss -- that surface could catch the light from the scanner and interfere.

Overall it sounds to me like you got a lemon. I'd consider taking it back and exchanging for another one as a first step.

Joe

 

[BlueEarth]

You're thinking correctly. If you're not re-sizing the scans and you're scanning at 300 dpi then you're correct to assume the scan should capture the full detail of the original. One other concern occurs to me. If your originals are prints with a textured surface -- luster or semi-gloss -- that surface could catch the light from the scanner and interfere.

After much investigation, I have concluded that this is the main problem. Many of the photos that I am trying to scan have a matte finish (it may be luster finish, not sure of the terminology). They are slightly textured and appear to be made up of many tiny dots. The dots are readily apparent when viewing the photos at an angle with the light, as the light glints off of the dots. I already knew that this was a problem because the scanner was picking up the dots in the scan. I was using photo editing software to try to minimize the dots, using blurring techniques, despeckle, and descreen. My scanner also has descreen, but it doesn't work very well.

What I did not realize was that not only is the textured surface being picked up by the scanner, but the texture is apparently also causing the scanner to not be able to pick up other details in the photo. It's like the texture is creating a barrier that reduces the ability of the scanner to scan beneath the texture and pick up all the details that are actually there in the photo. I think it's because of how the light from the scanner passes over the photo as it scans. It creates a kind of glare and obscures the photo. The scanner is good enough to pick up most of the detail, but it doesn't pick up everything because of the glare.

The way that I realized this was by scanning a glossy print. The scanner picked up all the details in the glossy print. I edited the photo somewhat and sharpened it and the resulting printout was actually better than the original print.

So the culprit is the textured surface of the photos. Dang. I think out of all the photos that I want to scan, about half of them are glossies and half are textured. So at least I will get good scans/prints from the glossies.

 

[BlueEarth]

I am writing this as an update to this thread. I am the person who created this thread in May of this year. If this doesn't interest you, then please just move along. I am writing this as a way to possibly help other people who may have the same problems that I did, and who may stumble upon this thread while searching the Internet for help.

So, my problem was with getting good quality scans of prints, especially textured prints, but all prints in general. This was just a family photo project, not a professional job. I had very little knowledge about scanning photos when I started this. The first thing that I purchased was a Canon MP280 all-in-one printer/scanner. That's what the thread here was about. The specs on the scanner indicated scanning resolution of 1200 dpi x 2400 dpi. At the time, based on what I had read, I assumed that this would be more than enough for 300 dpi scans of 4x6 prints. Many of the authoritative things that I had read online, and all of the advice that I was given when I asked for advice, told me that a 300 dpi scan is a 300 dpi scan, regardless of what scanner it is done on. I was made to believe that a mid-range scanner would give the same results at 300 dpi as a high-end scanner would at 300 dpi, therefore there is no reason to buy a high-end scanner if all you want is 300 dpi scans.

Well, this simply is not true. I found this out through trial and error, and a few hundred bucks. Being disappointed in the quality of the scans that I was getting with the MP280, I shelled out the $200 for the Canon CanoScan 9000F scanner. I knew immediately when I did my first 300 dpi scan on the CanoScan 9000F that the quality was much, much better than the 300 dpi scans on the Canon MP280. So, a 300 dpi scan on one scanner is NOT the same as a 300 dpi scan on another scanner. The quality of 300 dpi scans on higher-end scanners is better than the quality of 300 dpi scans on lower-end scanners. In particular, in scans from the CanoScan 9000F, colors were more accurate, there wasn't as much degradation in the dark areas of the photos, and it didn't pick up as much of the texture or dots on matte photos as did the Canon MP280. So that was my first lesson. I should have bought the CanoScan 9000F to begin with, but I guess I had to learn through trial and error because I had no way of knowing that the scans on the CanoScan 9000F would be that much better than the scans on the Canon MP280. Part of writing this is to tell anyone in the same position, just go ahead and buy the CanoScan 9000F or a similar high-end scanner. If you want really good, accurate reproductions of your prints, don't bother with a $50 all-in-one printer/scanner (unless future models have better capabilities).

I am happy to say that the CanoScan 9000F performed pretty well for what I intended to use it for. I got really good scans of glossy prints, pretty good scans of matte prints (like Kodak Endura E-Series paper or Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper). Older photos with really pronounced texture were not as good, but still way better than with the MP280. And if anyone is wondering, no these are not copyrighted photos. These are just family photos taken by family members, so no copyright violation.

I learned a lot about scanning and how to get good scans. Many people here probably already know a lot about this, but I can still pass along some pointers if it will help anyone. First is, I gave up 300 dpi right away. The scan quality on the CanoScan 9000F was so good, that I scanned everything in as high resolution as I thought was reasonable, so that I could get as much detail as possible. Most photos were scanned at either 1200 dpi or 800 dpi. Some larger photos were scanned at 600 dpi, since the larger resolution created too large of a file. I find that scanning at a very high resolution, then editing that large file (I use GIMP for photo editing), resizing down to the desired size, creates a better quality final image than scanning at 300 dpi and editing that 300 dpi image. What I am doing is scanning at high resolution, doing all the editing on that high resolution file, then cropping to my desired aspect ratio (usually 4x6), resizing to the proper dimensions (1200 pixels by 1800 pixels for a 4x6 print), then sharpening that resized image. I also saved all the raw scans as tifs, and I'm working with tifs. These are huge files. Each scan is about 50 mb or larger. The final images that I print from will be jpgs, but I'm doing all the editing with tifs. Some people will say that it's pointless to scan a print at anything higher than 300 dpi, because the print itself was only printed at 300 dpi or less, so you're not picking up anything more than 300 dpi. But I find that scanning at the higher resolution, editing, then resizing down to 300 dpi creates a better output.

I also had to scan some of the textured prints with the scanner's descreen function on, but here is another thing that I learned. I found that scanning with descreen on AND unsharp mask on at the same time gives the best combination of retaining the sharpness and reducing the texture. Some will say that if you descreen, turn off unsharp mask. I find that descreen without unsharp mask just makes the image too blurry, unless you have a texture that is extremely pronounced that you are trying to reduce. If you keep unsharp mask on, it doesn't override the descreen, but it minimizes the blurryness. This might only apply to the CanoScan 9000F. Other scanners may be different in how they work. It took a lot of trial and error to figure this out, but when I did figure it out I was pleased with the results.

Another thing is only scan in advanced mode using the scanner driver. Under preferences, set the scanner to calibrate before every scan. And turn off the automatic color adjustment feature. I got the most accurate color reproduction with the preferences set to color matching, with the output being sRGB color.

Maybe this will help someone. Thanks!

 

[The_Traveler]

wow, you went a long way in a short time.
congratulations.