I recently bought a Brother MFC-J470DW All-in-one printer because out of the box it printed the most true-to-what-I'm-seeing-on-my-screen photos I had ever seen (this, after a long career of dealing with photo printers)
Now it also has a scanner as part of the bundlea pretty straightforward technology these days, there is a threshold for how good an image scanner can practically get.
The 1200dpi limitation of the scanner isn't a huge factor to meI know film negatives or slides deserve a scanner unto themselves, but I'm running into a problem, I assume from the printer's origin as an office utility for scanning documents:
The scans are overexposing the drawings I'm putting into it to the point where, when the grey is light enough, it will clip to white, destroying the information. Using the highest quality settings and exporting to TIFF which won't lose the ultra light shades to compression, the problem still persists. With a scanner I've always been able to find every flaw even with a 'clean' white sheet of paper, and then color correct (levels, curves) so that the white would clip and it would clean up, but the scanner seems to be doing it for me.
Suggestions? Is this software, firmware, or hardware? I've tried scanning with Brother's ControlCenter2, OS X's utility found through the System Preferences>Print & Scan pane, The scanner's button interface, Photoshop CC's File>Import>Images from Device...
They all produce images like this,
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13686226/Brother clipped scan gamma.jpg
which should have grubby grease marks, graphite smudges, slight variations in the reflectivity/thickness of the paper, etc. But as you can see the background is a pristine white with little islands of black where the darkness threshold has been reached. (I applied a gamma adjustment to the image to make the effect more obvious)
Changing color profiles or using the Brightness slider in any of the software controllers do not change the nature of the issue. They just perform color math operations on the resulting image, not initiating any changes upstream.
I've heard about 'scanner calibration' but I'm having trouble finding anything that's current. (within the last few years)
Now it also has a scanner as part of the bundlea pretty straightforward technology these days, there is a threshold for how good an image scanner can practically get.
The 1200dpi limitation of the scanner isn't a huge factor to meI know film negatives or slides deserve a scanner unto themselves, but I'm running into a problem, I assume from the printer's origin as an office utility for scanning documents:
The scans are overexposing the drawings I'm putting into it to the point where, when the grey is light enough, it will clip to white, destroying the information. Using the highest quality settings and exporting to TIFF which won't lose the ultra light shades to compression, the problem still persists. With a scanner I've always been able to find every flaw even with a 'clean' white sheet of paper, and then color correct (levels, curves) so that the white would clip and it would clean up, but the scanner seems to be doing it for me.
Suggestions? Is this software, firmware, or hardware? I've tried scanning with Brother's ControlCenter2, OS X's utility found through the System Preferences>Print & Scan pane, The scanner's button interface, Photoshop CC's File>Import>Images from Device...
They all produce images like this,
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13686226/Brother clipped scan gamma.jpg
which should have grubby grease marks, graphite smudges, slight variations in the reflectivity/thickness of the paper, etc. But as you can see the background is a pristine white with little islands of black where the darkness threshold has been reached. (I applied a gamma adjustment to the image to make the effect more obvious)
Changing color profiles or using the Brightness slider in any of the software controllers do not change the nature of the issue. They just perform color math operations on the resulting image, not initiating any changes upstream.
I've heard about 'scanner calibration' but I'm having trouble finding anything that's current. (within the last few years)