Changing Scanner Brightness (Shallow Thoughts)

Changing Scanner Brightness

It's Mars season (Mars was at opposition at the beginning of November, so Mars is relatively close this month and it's a good time to observe it) and I've been making pencil sketches of my observations. Of course, that also means firing up the scanner in order to put the sketches on a web page.

Last weekend I scanned the early sketches. It was the first time in quite a while that I'd used the scanner (which seldom gets used except for sketches), and probably only the second time since I switched to Ubuntu. I was unreasonably pleased when I plugged it in, went to GIMP's Acquire menu, and was able to pull up xsane with no extra fiddling. (Hooray for Ubuntu! Using Debian for a while gives you perspective, so you can get great joy over little things like "I needed to use my scanner and it still works! I needed to make a printout and printing hasn't broken recently!")

Anyway, xsane worked fine, but the scans all came out looking garish -- bright and washed out, losing most of the detail in the shading. I know the scanner is capable of handling sketches (it's a fairly good scanner, an Epson Perfection 2400 Photo) but nothing I did with the brightness, contrast, and gamma adjustments got the detail back.

The adjustment I needed turned out to live in the "Standard Options" window in xsane: a Brightness slider which apparently controls the brightness of the light (it's different from the brightness adjustment in the main xsane scanning window). Setting this to -2 gave me beautiful scans, and I was able to update my 2005 Mars sketch page.

Tags: tech
[ 14:13 Nov 22, 2005    More tech | permalink to this entry | ]