Scanning original wa

[mwolf]

I have Silverfast SE V6.5.5r2, Epson V700 scanner.
Any suggestions for workflow, tips, for scanning original watercolors?
The prescan is almost never a good match, but some prescans are easy to correct (using the tools in Scan Pilot) to close to the original on a calibrated LCD monitor screen - others drive me nuts and still are not right. In both cases using 48 -24 bit color, Standard mode, reflective original.
Should I use 48 bit HDR? Any other thoughts?

thanks
mwolf

[jheinzl]

You calibrate your scanner before scanning (my 750V came with targets and software for calibration but it may be different for the 700 / outside Germany)?

You've got some sort of daylight lamp as otherwise what you see on the screen just may seem different to what the original looks like.

Have you yet (let) made a print of one of your scanned results and compare it to the original? Of course printing yourself requires calibration of the printer and, compare to the hardware to calibrate monitors, hardware to calibrate a printers (for specific papers) tends to be costly.

Oh and to make things worse even the orientation of the paper relative to the movement of the lamp can make a difference, though not affecting the colours.

Last but not least some guessing -- guess even the used papers, say what chemicals are in the paper to enhance brightness for instance and what colours used are made of and how both react on the light spectrum of the scanner's lamp may make a difference.

For HDR -- with SF HDR means "just" that what you get is what the sensor saw and not a file adjusted to, usually, Adobe RGB. Still if your scanner sends "wrong" colour data they're going to remain so no matter whether you use HDR or not.