This article appeared in the July/August 1999 issue of PT. To purchase this issue and receive this and other valuable articles in this issue, CLICK HERE: Ship within the U.S. | Ship outside the U.S.

July/August 1999

When one contemplates indulging in digital imaging, one quickly discovers that there seem to be only two paths:

 1. very expensive equipment that provides image quality equal to, or better than, conventional photography;

 2. affordable systems that are interesting in their own right but don’t offer the quality of conventional photography.

As a mostly serious fine printer, the highest-quality equipment interests me, but is completely out of my (financial) league; I’ve been waiting for the cost-to-quality ratio to approach something re-sembling sanity. Last year, I stumbled onto something I could not only afford, but that extended my capabilities as a fine printer beyond what I could accomplish in the darkroom. For an investment of a few hundred dollars, I could produce better prints than my best efforts with conventional darkroom materials.

What I discovered was a way to rescue negatives that were important to me but so marginal in quality that no amount of work in the darkroom could produce a satisfactory print. The key was a low-cost flat-bed scanner—the UMAX Astra 610S. I paid less than $150 for it almost two years ago; today, that would buy a much better scanner. My lowly UMAX was good enough to scan prints I made from those poor negatives into my computer, where I could correct deficiencies that no amount of advanced darkroom technique could eliminate. Furthermore, I found I could improve them so much that prints made on a low-end inkjet printer (the kind that sell for a few hundred dollars today) looked better than my original Ektacolor prints.

An extension of the darkroom
What I do with the computer is a logical extension of what I do in the darkroom. I’m trying to make the best print I can from a negative, and I’m applying the same understanding of negative characteristics and photography in both venues. The work is done at a monitor rather than at an enlarger, but, psychologically and aesthetically, it’s still photography to me.

I’ve even done restoration, resurrecting old, deteriorated prints that seemed beyond hope. There seems to be no end of the uses to which one can put this inexpensive equipment in the name of better photographs. In case this might be new to you too, this selection of Cheap Scanner Tricks is for your education and inspiration.

What you need
The UMAX 610S scans at 300 ppi by 600 ppi in 30-bit depth with 24-bit output. Its usable density range is about 1.9 d.u. Just about any scanner you buy today will have specs that are as good or better than this. My printer is an ancient HP Deskjet 560C. Any of today’s inkjet printers, with prices starting at about $200, will produce better prints than this one. If you’re willing to spend a little more, you can buy one of the so-called “photo-realistic” printers; they produce prints that, while not of true photographic quality, are comparable to good magazine reproduction quality.

If you want really high quality, a service bureau will make a Kodak thermal transfer or Fujix Pictography print for $10–$20 that provide true photographic quality. For the illustrations for this article, I used a Kodak 8670 PS thermal printer that I’m testing for a future article. At about $7,000, this is one of the “very expensive” devices I alluded to. Your print quality from a low-end inkjet won’t look as good, but I’ll show a sample or two of my Deskjet 560’s print output in this article so you can see how much improvement even a very-poor-but-corrected inkjet print can show over an uncorrected photographic print.

If you’re interested in digital imaging, you probably already have sufficient computer hardware. I started doing these “cheap scanner tricks” with a 13-inch monitor, 4 megabyte 24-bit video card, 64 megs of RAM, and a 133 MHz (not MMX) Pentium CPU. That’s less power than you’ll get with any $1000 computer system you can buy today.

I then added another 100 megabytes of RAM and a 233 MHz MMX Pentium. The additional RAM made the biggest difference. Unless you want to be swapping data to disk, which slows operations by an order of magnitude, you’ll need three to five times as much free RAM (that’s after system and software overhead) as the image file sizes you want to work with. To make good 8x10 prints, you’ll be working with 10 to 20 megabyte files, which means you should have at least 64 megabytes of free RAM. With RAM currently going for about a buck a meg, I suggest you put as much RAM in your machine as it can take. It will pay off better than a faster CPU or bus.

Your image-manipulating program needs the following features: curve and histogram tools; a saturation tool; masks; and the ability to let you work in each color channel individually. Additional tools, such as a cloning tool and the ability to use continuous-tone masks, will make your life easier. I use Adobe Photoshop 5.0, but it’s overkill for this application. In the following examples, I used Photoshop’s more sophisticated tools as little as possible. There are several programs well under $100 that will suffice, such as Jonathan Sacks’ excellent “Picture Window.”

These are not cookbook recipes to be followed slavishly—they are much more in the spirit of the “Master Printing Class” columns, intended to instruct and inspire. The specific settings I use are important only insofar as they illuminate the underlying concepts and reasoning.

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