[sane-devel] Epson V500 Gray negative scan problem

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Drasko DRASKOVIC <drasko.draskovic at gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Drasko DRASKOVIC
> <drasko.draskovic at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> I am trying to set up my Epson V500 to scan correctly B&W negatives with XSane.
>>
>> I am using Epson Avasys driver (epkowa backend), and with iscan !
>> negative scan seem to be working very well.
>> However, when I am trying to obtain scan in XSane, scanned quality is
>> really bad. It looks like it has really bad resolution or bitdepth.
>>
>> It might be due to some settings, because when I put Scanmode to
>> "color" (although I have B&W film negatives), results are with much
>> better resolution, but then I just can not turn result in Gray - it
>> rests orange...
>>
>> What is the process of Black and White negative scan, are there some
>> options that I am missing ?
>>
>> BR,
>> Drasko
>
>
> Hi all,
> after some research I can see that this can be similar problem to this
> one reported long time ago :
>
> http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/O5zM9Q3LfrJPmrlJxC1J

Wow!  That's a way-back-when post by me.  I've since gotten a lot more
familiar with iscan and can now confidently say that almost all image
processing with iscan/epkowa is done in the iscan frontend.  Conversion
of negatives is definitely done in the frontend.

> Does anybody have idea how this can be resolved ?
> How autoexposure/enhancement can be set-up to be correct and resemble
> to what iscan is doing ?

Apart from using iscan, you cannot.

The image processing module is non-free (with an effectively
undocumented API) so most frontends will not be able to use it.

> Can this be used :
> http://www.xsane.org/doc/sane-xsane-setup-enhancement-doc.html
> or these setting should be used only for lineart (i.e. commic scans)
> and not for film negative scans ?

That would give you a black and white (without any gray) image.  I don't
think that's what you're after.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2           FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS CORPORATION
FSF Associate Member #1962               Help support software freedom
                 http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=1962