Imaging 12 - Fujifilm Graphic Systems

I
n the last few years scanning
has undergone a radical
transformation, from closelyguarded
black art with
lengthy apprenticeships, hugely expensive
machinery and inscrutable operators
whose pronouncements could not be
contradicted, to a demystified everyday
activity for users in the design and print
mainstream. Current high-end flatbed
scanners now claim quality to rival – or at
least get within spitting distance of – their
behemoth drum ancestors, together with
convenience and highly automated software
that does away with the need for
highly-trained and expensive operators.
At least, that’s how the marketing
goes. But if you’re thinking of getting a
high quality flatbed scanner can you really
just mount the originals, adjust a few
simple settings, press ‘scan’ and leave
everything to the software?
Let there be light
According to Fujifilm Graphic Systems’
scanner demonstrator Peter Virgo the
answer these days is usually yes. One
reason for his confidence is that unlike the
drum scanner operators of yesteryear,
today’s flatbed users can literally see what
they’re doing. With a properly colour managed
set-up, you can see what you’re
going to get, if not necessarily on a screen
(see page 23) then certainly on a good
quality digital proof.
That brings us to the other reason why
scanning has become so much simpler –
the software has been developed to
encapsulate years of operators’ experience
but allows you to make adjustments based
on easily understandable visual concepts
such as ‘light original’ or ‘enhance shadow
detail’. Exactly which optical or digital
scanning parameters are being adjusted
when you select these you probably don’t
need to know in 90 per cent of cases.
With modern scanner software you also
get the ability play with a variety of the
parameters independently to gauge the
optimum result – the drum scanner
operator used to have to do it all in one
go, balancing the different requirements in
his head as he decided what settings were
needed. By contrast, scanning software
and image editing programs such as
Adobe Photoshop allow a wide range of
adjustments for both aesthetic and
production-related purposes.
In the absence of any other
instructions the standing brief for the
drum scanner operator was always to get
the best match to the original, but since
the result couldn’t be seen until much
later in the production process (unless
scatter proofs were made immediately)
they were working blind and had to learn
to tell by eye which settings would need
adjusting for a particular type of original.
Nowadays by comparison, “with the right
hardware and software any competent
operator with an eye for colour should be
able to get a reasonable quality scan, a
good facsimile of the original,” according
to Virgo.
Certain operations such as scaling,
basic colour correction and unsharp
masking (USM) are still better performed
by scanning software at the time of
scanning (or when preparing an outputspecific
image, see ‘See you SOOM’ panel)
than as adjustments or corrections after
the event, says Fujifilm’s Virgo, though
noting that the ‘garbage in garbage out’
principle still applies – “a poor original still
can’t give you a good result.”
With that in mind, it’s still useful to
have a basic grasp of the things that go
on during the scanning process so that
you can get the best out of difficult or
unusual originals.
Look sharp
Unsharp masking (USM) algorithms are
designed to improve the apparent sharpness
of scanned images without producing
“ANY COMPETENT MAC OPERATOR SHOULD BE ABLE
TO GET A REASONABLE QUALITY SCAN THAT IS A
GOOD FACSIMILE OF THE ORIGINAL”
the sort of grainy or speckly artifacts that
Photoshop’s sharpen filter does. The
process involves analysing the content of
the image to detect areas of high contrast
(typically the edges of objects) and add a
contrasting ‘halo’ on either side of the
boundary to increase the perceived sharpness
in the final screened image. USM has
been a feature of digital scanning since its
inception (and itself mimics an analogue
process) so as you might expect, vendors
with a background in top quality drum
scanning place a lot of stock in the quality
of their sharpening algorithms.
Some vendors’ software performs the
USM operation as part of the scan, so it’s
important to get it right. Most scanning
software lets you preview the sharpening
effect, a benefit that drum scanner
operators didn’t have, but treat this with
caution, as an effect that looks extreme
when viewing a file on-screen at 100 per
cent may be inadequate when the image is
screened and printed. Bear in mind also
that sharpening can’t rescue an out-offocus
photograph – you might get a small
improvement, but if you push it too far all
that will happen is that you’ll start
enhancing the film grain instead.
It’s probably best to start with the
default settings and only adjust for
difficult originals – original art such as
watercolour paintings, soft pencil or
charcoal sketches, for example, could
bring up the texture of the paper too
much or exaggerate the graininess of the
strokes. In reproducing original art of this
kind there are usually aesthetic decisions
to be made as well as production ones – is
the colour and texture of the paper part of
the work or not? Your scanning software
WHY GET A HIGH-END
FLATBED?
With flatbed scanners from office equipment
vendors available for under £100 and
apparently capable of scanning reflection
and transparent originals, the question
‘why spends thousands of pounds?’ is more
pertinent than ever.
It’s long been true that the quality of
image yielded by a scanner is as much
dependent on the software as the optics,
which is why buying a scanner from a
vendor with a background in professional
colour repro is more likely to get you good
software. This is crucial in a range of
factors that directly affect image quality,
from interpolated resolution (for enlargements
that exceed the optical limits of the
system) to unsharp masking. You’re also
more likely to find proper colour management
(including profile creation and editing
tools) and additional capabilities such as
de-screening or copydot scanning.
On the hardware side, high-end
flatbeds have better quality optics and
CCDs, better engineered mechanisms – for
both precision and longevity – and a
variety of productivity features from faster
scanning to large format (A3 or greater)
originals support and batch scanning.
Imaging 12 autumn 2002 27