Hello again,

as you may have noticed, photos with lots of near-white areas are
particularly hard to get good scans of. Most scanners, even better ones,
have a tendency of sinking these areas all into white. If you browse the
net you'll most likely find many pictures like that, especially older
ones who have a tendency to fade out over the years, or overexposed
prints, thus becoming extremely difficult stuff for the scanner.

This tiger pic is one of mine which has that specific problem, being an
old print whose negative does not exist any more. If you have similar
stuff to scan, simply get yourself some plastic transparencies used for
overhead projectors, and put one of them between the scanner glass and
the print to scan. The transparency will provide you with about 5 % of
light absorption which should be sufficient to prevent the bright areas
from sinking into plain white whereas the impact on the shadowy areas is
almost invisible.

If you have very bright and/or thin prints to scan it is also helpful to
place a sheet of black cardboard between the print and the scanner lid
in case it is white. A white scanner lid reflects substantial amounts of
light, thus making the scans too bright and, even worse, sometimes
projecting text on the back side of the print right into the scan.

The cat pictured here, by the way, lives in Duesseldorf Zoo, Germany.
Taken about August 1995.

Greetings again -

Ralf

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