Pink Petunia Back In The Day

[Charles Wesley]

Been testing out my newly purchased Epson Perfection 4990 Photo Scanner. The weather stinks here. Had to replace my older scanners. This one was bought used. Seems to work very well for me after checking out a review and information on another forum about testing and proper useage.

Nikon F5, Nikkor 200 mm f/4.0 macro lens, SB 25 flash
and tripod. Back in 1997 when I took this shoot most everyone was using Kodakchrome. Used MLU and a timed exposure. Not sure of the settings.

Epson Perfection 4990 Photo Scanner
PS/CS4
FocalBlade

Enjoy...
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Charlie Wesley
St. Augustine Beach, FL
http://naturesphotographs.com (http://naturesphotographs.com/)

[Mike Moats]

Hey Charlie, the back lighting really makes this pop. excellent details on the backlit hairs.

[Allen Sparks]

This is a wonderful one to dig up from the archives. Really like the light hitting the flower filaments. And, yes, I usually prefer darker backgrounds so this suits my taste as well.

[Nick Palmieri]

The flower is great for all the reasons mentioned above. Although I don't have a solution the crop just does not look correct to me. I wish the flower was a little more diagonal in the frame. Other than that very nice job, love the back lighting and the detail in the flower.

[Ken Childs]

Charlie, it looks like your new scanner passed the test.

The backlighting on this is wonderful! As to the crop, maybe a little off the top and left might help.

[Charles Wesley]

Thanks everyone: I highly recommend Epson flatbed scanners i.e. 4490, 4990, V700 & V750 for scanning old slides and negatives. The secret is to find the sweet spot usually 1/2 to 1 inch above the scanner glass and to selectively sharpen your image in PS. I prefer FocalBlade after reading Michael Reichmann's review several years ago....
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Charlie Wesley
St Augustine Beach, FL

[Barbara Kile]

Lovely detail and backlighting. Agree with crop on left.

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi Charley. Very nice details and I like the backlight a lot. What postprocessing did you do on this image? I see a lot of strange things going on: BG is very noisy, I see a darker black halo around the flower in which there are what look like sharpening artifacts (or just more noise) and I see a vertical stripe running from top to bottom just to the left of the flower. Left of the stripe, BG is a different shade of black and there is no noise (I'm guessing you added canvans here).
I'm not sure whether it came out of your scanner this way, since all the details on the flower seem to have been captured very good!

[Charles Wesley]

Jerry,

Thanks for the comments. After enlarging the image in PS and Neat Image to 200 %, I see the noise. Thanks for catching it. My processing was as follows: Create a duplicate layer, levels, curves, contrast adjustment, shadow/ highlight tool in PS/CS4. After running PS and before sharpening, I ran Neat Image. Scanners can be noisy. One is working with a second generation image after converting from film to digital.

When I scanned the image my marquee selection may have been larger than the actual slide leading to the extra black in the image.. I did not add canvas anywhere. I sharpen with the FocalBlade plugin. I only do this selectively and not global in nature. My Lasso tool selection may have been too wide leading to the noise around the flower. I should have used my Waucom tablet on this one. Have a worthless mouse that came with the computer. Just ordered a much better mouse from Amazon today.

Jerry thanks for the critique it really helped me...
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Charlie Wesley
St. Augustine Beach, FL
http://naturesphotographs.com

[Vida van der Walt]

Beautiful image Charlie. The fall of light on those little hairs and the vibrant pink against the black bg are wonderful.:)

[Julie Kenward]

Nice work, Charlie - I would never have guessed this was a scanned image.

Compositionally, I think it would be stronger with that top leaf missing and a bit more angle into the frame but it's nice as presented. Mike's right about the backlighting - it really works here as it brings out all those tiny filaments on the flower's greenery.

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi Charles, glad to be of help. I'm still impressed by the results you got with this scanner. My scanner (on a two-in one from Canon) does the opposite: not much noise, but very soft, which proves hard to repair in PP. I totally hear what you're saying about that mouse. I also stopped relying on automatic selection and just paint on my masks. A little more work, but usually worth the effort.

[Charles Wesley]

Jerry,

Still working on testing my scanner. It may not be as noisy as I thought. Hopefully, it was my fault for the noise. Do notice the softness you see with your Canon. The sweet spot on mine is about 1/2 to 1 mm. above the flatbed glass.

I bring the sharpness back from my Epson scans using a plugin called FocalBlade or sometimes use Smart Sharpening but am careful in not over doing it. I only use FocalBlade selectively on the subject.

Hope this helps....
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Charlie Wesley
St Augustine Beach, F

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi Charlie,

I'm looking again at your image on another monitor, but now don't notice anything of the noise or halo. Here it all looks very sharp, detailed and colorful. Maybe my other monitor shows too much of the details.
I have two questions about your scanning. You say that the sweet spot of your Epson is slightly above the flatbed glass. How do you know this, and is there anything you can do about it (i.e. putting a transparent on the glass or something)?

[Charles Wesley]

Jerry,

I'm frequently on www.photo-i.co.uk in their forums. The owner has extensive knowledge in reviewing ink jet printers and scanners. Check out the Epson 4990 Forum. You will learn more than you can believe.

Understand the monitor difference. My MacBook Pro reflective LCD is unforgiving compared to my Dell 20" Ultra Vision monitor for my PC...
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Charlie Wesley
St Augustine Beach, FL