Scanner Color Correction

Common wisdom in digital imaging says that you scan the image at the scanners native resolution and do all of the adjusting in an application like Photoshop. This is misinformation totally disregards recent advances in imaging technology.

Doing as much color correction as possible using your scanning software delivers far more and better data to Photoshop. You will need Microtek's ScanWizard Pro or Silverfast software to have a good set of color correction tools. Other manufacturers stopped developing their software a long time ago.

Compare these two 300ppi images:

The changes for both photos consisted of: crop, levels, curves and finished with unsharp masking. The image on the left was scanned with no enhancements made while scanning and all changes in Photoshop. The image on the right had the same enhancements made in the scanning software.

Now, compare the green channel histograms from each.

The histogram on the left is from the image adjusted in Photoshop. The histogram on the right is from the image adjusted using the scanning software. Notice the gaps in the histogram. This is color information that is forever lost. Gaps in the histogram in a very general sense result in a less pleasing, lower quality image.

Hopefully this is enough of an example to justify the use of scanning software to correct images and stimulate manufacturers to make more sophisticated software available.

It is by no means a test with any disciplined methodology. But I think it's a pretty good indicator.