It's tempting to think of photo scanning as being the same as digital photography, after all you end up with a jpg file of a person, an event or a scene. Just like you do with your digital camera or phone.
Except it's not. First, you've got to think about the controls of the scanner being similar to those of your digital camera and I'm afraid scanners aren't great when it comes to exposure, colour balance etc. Second, even if you get a faithful scan of that photo, the original may have been badly exposed or composed in the first place, leaving you with post scanning work to do.
Hence the need for some decent software to accompany the scanning process. My first mention then is for decent scanner software. As a photo scanning service it's worth our while to invest on that - we use Silverfast for our Epsons and an honourable mention must go to Kodak's brilliant scanner code particularly in its ability to automatically restore faded colours.
Most of the post scanning image adjustment work I do, including to my own photos, is done on Mac computers using Apple's Aperture program. I think it's great and it does all I need of it. However I am concerned that Apple seem to be neglecting this part of their empire (maybe they're all worrying about iPhone 6) so I have to accept the case for using Adobe's Lightroom product grows stronger by the day.
No comments:
Post a Comment