Hi

Could anyone offer some help or advice on scanning paintings for publishing in a book.

The project is to scan bird paintings about 50 plates that were painted for a field guide to Birds of Southern Africa. The book will be A5 and the paintings are fairly large to start of with done on a matt finish paper similar to H. Photorag.

My main concerns are colour and intensity. My aim is to scan so the final print is as near to the original as possible. I have a Microtek scanner that I have calibrated and I get very nice scans.

Once I have calibrated my scanner, should I do adjustments in silverfast when I do the scan? or will this throw out my colour? Should I change the white and black point or leave the levels alone?

Another problem I have is that I am not sure who will print the book so cant ask for any colour profiles etc from them.

Any help would be appreciated

From my limited experience profiling scanners, I've found the targets used to build a scanner profile work only for scanning the media (i.e. Kodak, Agfa film or print) they're made from. Scanning real objects like paintings are best left to using the scanner's software and then tweaking in Photoshop or other "by eye" methods.

Most paint pigment used to represent colors in nature as in the subject matter of your paintings fall well within a monitor's space so whatever the scanner can capture in 48bit RAW=(No color adjust), you could assign your monitor space or others like Colormatch and convert to AdobeRGB or ProPhotoRGB and edit in Photoshop which will give you far better previews for fast zooming and tools for tweaking over any scanner software.

I've done this with negatives (since there are no profile targets for this media type) and have gotten very good results just using Auto Color and setting B/W points in PS on my Epson 4870 flatbed 48bit RAW neg scans in two clicks. You'll find experimenting with assigning and converting various matrix based profiles like Colormatch, AdobeRGB, ProPhotoRGB will give you different shadow roll off and hue/saturation characteristics that might get you close to the original subject with very little tweaking. See Attachment.

Or you could assign the canned profile and see what happens. I've heard Don Hutcheson of Hutchcolor has created a very comprehensive scanner profiling target that may work with all types of image capture but it's a bit expensive. Do a web search to find out. Click to view attachment