Color issues with scanning

**MisterBoo** · March 20th, 2012, 06:02 PM

Most of my work is in watercolor and I'm having a lot of trouble keeping the same vibrancy and clarity of color that I have in my originals. I'm using a Canoscan LiDE 110, which to be honest, is kind of a cheap scanner, but I was hoping there was a way to correct this. Everything just comes out really grey and trying to fix it in photoshop just doesn't cut it. Advice?

**ikken** · March 20th, 2012, 08:12 PM

never ever scan color sensitive work - I've only had some medium luck with gouache that's scanned smh decently due to its uniform, flat matte texture;
for anything else, scanner is way too harsh, you need to get a camera, tripod and a basic light set-up to get accurate and good quality reproductions.

**Elwell** · March 20th, 2012, 08:23 PM

Turn off all auto setting on your scanner, get a raw scan, and adjust in Photoshop. Use adjustment layers as much as possible because they're editable and non-distructive.
I get far better results from scanning my work than I do with photography.

**MisterBoo** · March 20th, 2012, 08:41 PM

Thanks, I will give that a try. I've had very limited success with photographing my work (even when my art director hired a professional to photograph my work for a book). I have some trouble pushing my contrast and my darks when painting (the curse of the timid watercolorist) and I find that my work gets very washed out when photographed.

**ikken** · March 22nd, 2012, 01:32 AM

Originally Posted by Elwell

Turn off all auto setting on your scanner, get a raw scan, and adjust in Photoshop. Use adjustment layers as much as possible because they're editable and non-distructive.
I get far better results from scanning my work than I do with photography.

cool, I might try your advice later (when I get access to scanner again.)
I generally got better and quicker results with cameras, even some basic point-n-shoot ones,
but I'm not sure I ever got into raw scan processing before, thanks for that tip.

**MisterBoo** · March 23rd, 2012, 01:56 AM

So it turns out that all my issues were due to the images being automatically adjusted. I turned off all adjustments when scanning and then a little bit with curves in photoshop and everything come out perfect. I can't believe how much time I spent messing around with this when it was such an easy fix.