Can Improvments Be Made?

[RS-MAN]

Hi Everyone,

New to the forum so hello from the Isle of Man!

I am ‘wet’ scanning slides (at the moment NOT Kodachrome) with my Epson V750 and printing via my Canon Pixma 9500 Pro. I print either using a Canon Photoshop Plug-in or Photoshop.

Once finished, I open my image in Photoshop Bridge as a RAW file and do any corrections then open in Photoshop and ‘sharpen’ usually via ‘Nik Sharpener Pro 3’, which I find very easy to use and simple.

My Scanner is calibrated, so is my monitor and printer. I have no problem with colour.

Here are my settings:

Scan Type: 48 Bit Colour
Filter: None
My ‘Output’ is set to my finished print size
Q-Factor: 1.5
My dpi is set to 300. NOTE: I did try sliding the dpi slider all the way to the right and moving it one step back, but I had no joy.
In ‘Options’ my ‘Profiles for ICM, ‘Internal’ is: Pro Photo RGB

My results are quite simply stunning; however, I would like to know if I am doing everything correctly, and most importantly, I am getting the best out of my scanner? I am in no rush, quality is what I am after.

1: is setting my output to my finished print size to best option? Or can I scan bigger so in the future if I wish tom print larger I do not have to re-scan?
2: I have read my Canon printer is best set to 300dpi is this the best option in silverfast?

Once I have reached my goal, the only option then, would be to change my scanner! am I there yet?

Kind regards

Shaun

[LSI_Morales]

Hi Shaun

1: is setting my output to my finished print size to best option? Or can I scan bigger so in the future if I wish tom print larger I do not have to re-scan?
2: I have read my Canon printer is best set to 300dpi is this the best option in silverfast?

1. If I wanted to print to different sizes and am not sure which is the biggest print, I would scan to the biggest size posible (remember the scanner also has a physical limit) and keep it as my starting point
2. SilverFast does not have any influence on this, if you set SilverFast to 600 dpi but your printer is still set to 300 dpi, then the printer will produce an image twice the size as if SilverFast was set to 300 dpi.

Cheers

[RS-MAN]

Hi Alejandro,

Many thanks for your kind and fast response.

How do I find out what is my scanners ‘physical limit’ is?

Scanning to my 'scanners physical limit; does seem the best option.

Kind regards

Shaun

[LSI_Morales]

Hi Shaun,

The best way is to check the user manual of your device or the website with the product specs.

Cheers

[RS-MAN]

Hi Alejandro,

Epson say 6400 dpi does this mean I should set my dpi slider to 6400 regardless of what my output setting are, which default from 30.0 cm x 19.9 to 7.4 x 4.9 cm?

Is this my best option?

And once again thanks for your kind and fast response.

CheeRS

Shaun

[LSI_Morales]

Hi Shaun,

Epson say 6400 dpi does this mean I should set my dpi slider to 6400 regardless of what my output setting are, which default from 30.0 cm x 19.9 to 7.4 x 4.9 cm?

Not really, if you set the slider to 6400 dpi, you are forcing the scanner to use the highest optical resolution with for the input source. If you amplify the output value while using the max resolution, you are actually telling the application to interpolate the optical resolution to reach the desired output size.

In other words, your are telling your device to scan your picture at the maximum it can see, and give you a bigger image.
The scanner itself can not give you a bigger image because it has reached its limit, to enlarge the resulting image the scanning application will have to invent the information in-between every pixel, this is made using different mathematical methods called interpolation.

Interpolation can be applied to different degrees and it can lead to undesired artefacts in your resulting image, especially if the viewing distance for your pictures is very short.

So you can either choose the printing resolution and the output size
Or leave the input size (1:1 without any enlargement factor) and use the highest optical resolution.

Kind regards

[alyssaly]

Wow,so many factors!Thank you for all of your info!