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View Full Version : Scanning Issue: does this make sense?



DrTang
23-Jul-2013, 11:47
When I had a darkroom - I had the luxury of having one enlarger set up just for contact prints.. the light and time were dialed in and always the same so I could tell from the contact just how the negatives turned out (as I didn't compensate on that first contact)

Is there a way to do this with scanners?

like a standard setting that doesn't auto expose or compensate?

photobymike
23-Jul-2013, 12:01
yea but you would not want to use it..... Watch the histogram and you can tell if you are light or dark. Not perfect but you can get a feel for right exposure from the histogram.... Epson software does have a provision for turning off the "auto scan" function .....far left of the button row...

polyglot
23-Jul-2013, 17:32
Yes; use VueScan and its Lock Exposure button. Save the raw scan data to a 16-bit TIF and inspect the values therein using your favourite 16-bit editor: instant densitometer if you can do a bit of math and calibrate your scanner for a particular exposure level. Or just look at VueScan's Ctrl-1 (input) histogram but note that it has interesting (log/lin) options for the scale of each axis, and you can't tell where on the histogram each point of the image lies.