Bad Scanning?

[eespinosa]

Help!! I am relatively new to scanning. I was under the impression that a scanned photo would look similar to the original without having to do much tweaking. Boy was I wrong. I've been tweaking my **** off, but I can't get any of the photos to come close to the original. This goes for the image on the monitor as well as a printed image. Am I missing something? I've used Ulead's Photoimpact, Microsoft Photo Editor and Adobe Photodeluxe. All yielded the same results. Help!!!

[OuTpaTienT]

I don't understand what you're saying.

A scanned image looks exactly like the original (however a poor scan or scanner might result in the colors being a few shades off).

But if the problem is indeed how you describe it, then maybe something not connected properly, or maybe the scanner is defective, or maybe you're using the incorrect drivers to run the scanner...I dunno. If you could elaborate on the problem I'm sure someone here can help.

[Andy_L]

Did your scanner come with a program that allows you to adjust scanner/monitor contrast?

[CMonster]

2 things will help you greatly:

1. Scan at a higher DPI like 300 - 600 for photos

2. If this is a paralell port scanner and increasing the DPI doesn't help try a different paralell port configuration from BIOS

Remember that your screen resolution greatly affects the way they look on your display, but they may still print with photo quality.

[Richard_Cranium72]

I've used several scanners, mostly HP's, one Mustek 600. The HP gives perfect scans on automatic scanning at 300dpi. A 8x10 at 300 is somewhere around 26mb whereas the 600dpi it's some really huge number, I forget now. Printing or just moving a scan made at 600 takes a while. Maybe HP's "layering" print technology is making up for just average scans. My HP 5p says on the box "36bit" but at 24 bit I'm happy with the end result. And this old geek is a old shutterbug also.. DrVette