Scanner Problems

[markem]

When I did my first scan of the map I am working on it came out so white you could hardly see the pencil marks.

When I did my second scan the scanner turned the image a bit grey.

When I did my third scan the scanner turned the image a bit purple.

I tried the scanner on other things (like black and white photos as well as color photos) and it scans very nicely. That is to say - no problems. Black is black, white is white, and colors look right also.

So - ideas? I've check the lamp and it is just as bright as ever. Blindly bright actually. I tried adjusting the Gamma but that just made the paper look more grey (or maybe I should say darker grey). Tonight I'm going to go home and throughly clean the glass. The outside of the scanner had a layer of dust on it becuase it has been a while since I did any scanning. So even though this is a flatbed scanner and it has been closed up - maybe somehow the glass got dust on it. I've also unpluged and replugged the USB cable and power supply (reseating everything).

I'm using PaperPort v7.0 Deluxe and a Visioneer 7100 flatbed scanner.

The only thing that I haven't tried (and which just popped into my head) is the color saturation. Maybe if I ramped it down a bit it might look better.

Anyway - ideas?

[Midgardsormr]

It sounds like there's some kind of auto-exposure going on. Try putting something with a decent range of values in the corner of the scanner bed with your map and see if that helps it to normalize correctly.

[J.Edward]

Hey Markem,
I scan lots of pencil work myself and encounter various issues similar to yours.
Depending on what the tools in PaperPort are, I usually mess with the levels and the saturation with almost every scan.
Part of this is because I draw with H lead pencils, so the lines can be a bit lighter than if I only used B lead.
I will say that I have to pull down the highlights, which in turn can make the paper come out darker than white.
As such, I often have to 'clean' up scans. That's time consuming but necessary some times.

Pulling down saturation will definitely help avoid color cast.
Another trick you can try after the scan, once in say Photoshop, add a white layer beneath the original scan, then change the layer property of the scan layer to multiply and you can play a bit with getting it closer to how it actually looks. From what I've seen over the years with scanning pencil works, unless the drawing is highly contrasted you will likely have trouble getting it to capture the lighter subtleties.

[markem]

I'll try both of those excellent suggestions! I had wondered if I should just throw out color and use grayscale since it is just black & white. Do you think that will help also? Probably still need to play with the saturation. I think PaperPort v7 does have a way to ramp down the R-G-B portions individually. I'll have to try it. :-)

[J.Edward]

It's worth trying Markem. I have not done that myself.
As far as I understand it, I believe when you scan on the color setting, even if you reduce saturation, I believe you are getting more detail.
I could be wrong about that though. Certainly can't hurt to do a test using color and then another using grayscale.
You will have to change it later in PS if you're going to do color, as it will be in grayscale mode, not rgb.

Sometimes I will push up the yellow and red a little to get a more aged yellow paper look. Up a lot on yellow, up a little on red, and then bring saturation down but not all the way to get a nice old yellow look. I know that's not what you're after, just thought I'd throw that in there.

[lostatsea]

Out of curiosity why don't you use the scanning software that usually comes with the device ? Unless you are looking to keep the "graphite look" You can scan it in use Photoshop adjustment threshold to make it pure black and white. Posterize will let you keep some greys. Adjusting the levels will also help.

[markem]

lostatsea - The Visioneer software (ie: PaperPort) is the scanning software. As I said before - I also have a Fujitsu scanner but I'm holding off using it because it is an upright scanner and I don't want the graphite to get into the track. So I'm using the Visioneer flatbed scanner. I can, in that way, clean the glass with a soft cloth and some lens cleaner.

J.Edward - that is an interesting way to do the yellowed paper look. I was thinking of taking a parchment background and making it semi-transparent. In this way I can apply another layer behind the parchment and whatever color I put back there modifies the parchment look to being that color. So a yellowed paper look would (as you probably know already) have yellow behind it.

I wonder if I increased the resolution from 300dpi to 600dpi if that would help out any. The scanner also has a "Remove Moire Patterns". That may be also causing problems since the trees are similar to Moire patterns. Maybe the software is getting confused and trying to remove the lines? That might be why some of the lines look white. Maybe it is trying to remove them?

[johnvanvliet]

a "Remove Moire Patterns" would be doing a "butterworth" ring FFT ( Fast Fourier Transform )

Moire Patterns patterns are a pain in the "bleeped"
and best dealt with using MANUAL tools ( i have removed many on wikipedia images to be fixed - fixing them is a pastime )


now i am used to using Gimp to grab scans ( and start them )
or Photoshop ( or gimp) on windows with the twain plugin


i have yet to see GOOD " bloat ware" that comes with hardware


IS your hardware CALIBRATED ?

a quick check is to print one of the BUILT in to your printer " print test image "
( HP has many including a sailboat )

dose that match the image in the printer preview

scan it
dose that NEW image match the printed image and the printer ( on screen ) preview

if none of them are even close to each other , then you have a problem

[markem]

After removing the "Remove Moire Pattern" - the trees stopped turning white.
After selecting Gray Scale scanning - the image looks a lot better. After using the Wizard on the Gray Scale scan it darkened the lines and made the background white but not super bright. It looks a lot better now. :-)

[Midgardsormr]

Yes, remove moire should always be off unless a specific scan shows an obvious moire pattern. Even then, as John says, you can quite possibly do a better job by hand. Ideally you don't want the scanner to do any processing on the image at all—it can't do anything that Photoshop or Gimp can't, and one of those programs will give you a lot more control. Not to mention an Undo button.