bulk scanning with Epson flatbed

I was recently asked by a commenter to my blog to explore this question. I thought it was intuitive but its apparently not. Epson it seems (like many other IT companies) has taken the path of having numbskulls and under educated people take over support jobs (and perhaps even pushing out people there who actually know. I've worked in IT for about 15 years so I've seen it first hand elsewhere).

Anyway, to the point

How do you batch scan film and have the same setting applied to all

I do this by the following methods

Firstly you must put Epson scan into an appropriate mode, Professional. Lets look at the main pannel where I've marked some important places

The next step is done in configuration, so click that.

we need to choose appropriate colour handling from the three options available.

The first option of Colour Control (gosh these poor Japanese keep following Amerikan Speling) will automatically duff your stuff and you'll have to make educated guesses as to which profile you'll assign to your image in photoshop. Note that I said assign ... not convert ... important point.

So I have my target set to ColorMatch RGB in this instance as I find it works well enough for gamut contained in Negatives ... and wider gamuts may just introduce noise.

I am a little superstitious so I often close the dialog box at this point and then bring it up ... you know ... just in case.

Next we need to do a preview of the image do not use thumbnails that's again where the computer will decide for you ... and wherever possible, don't send a robot to to a humans job. Preview the whole plattern and manually select a rectangle on that.


and then adjust each of the colour channels (red green and blue)

Notice that I've left a little space either side of the histogram in the red above and even in the blue here. This is important as often there is some shadow details or high light details which are not shown in the histogram but which you can identify are clipped later.

With respect to the blue, its important also to shove it right over there to the left. I have found that this alters the scan time to make it longer. I believe that this activating some sort of exposure compensation and is giving a longer exposure to the channel. My results discussed elsewhere in this blog support this theory.

Now we have a general setting which will more or less be adequate for all negatives (well all the ones I've got here fit within this range).

So now you can do the next important step and click save settings. Stupidly it seems you can't name it, but that's ok for me as I only have two, one for negatives and the other for slides.

Now, next time you open up (and every time after that) if you select Setting 1 (or 2 ;-) after you've done your preview and it will put a marquee back right were you put it and reset the settings in the histogram to what you've just painstakingly set up.

Great!

Next important section, how do we make more on this platen?

You use the copy selected tool that appears in the preview window (as in the diagram to left).

Click it and another marquee will appear with exactly those settings. So move it to cover the other image you want to scan from the strip.

Repeat this for as many as you want on the preview area.

Now, Ctl + click each image (which you want scanned) and click scan and all those images will be scanned into your application.

Click Scan and job done!

Now as I use Photoshop I have a customised Action set up which does:

• assign profile (to Epson ColorMatch RGB in my case)
• invert

which I then play on the items. I'm now 90% of the way done on this batch scan. I often try Auto Color first and if that looks good I just leave it, but if that fails I fiddle with levels for R G and B then curves manually (and perhaps tweak the HUE).

Destination settings (like 48 bit or 1200dpi) are changed globally so will be applied to all not each. I guess this makes sence, but I can understand some may wish to have one scanned at 1200 and another at 4200dpi (I don't work this way).

works for me ... let me know if it works for you!
You may also find the following useful links:

• quick neg scan tutorial
• using the Epson for bulk scanning of 35mm colour neg (and getting your desired settings applied across all evenly)
• registration problems on older Epson scanners and why you shouldn't go too far in trying to adjust this or that because when you improve focus you may disturb registration
• using your scanner to understand film density.
• driving your scanner software differently to effect some changes in scanner side exposure on Epsons (meaning better noise characteristics in the dense areas of your negs).
• don't forget colour management on your Epson (its not where you might think it is)
• determining and tuning focus (if you suspect its out...)
• Black and White neg scanning