Printable View
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?
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...
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.