I’m an intermediate Photoshop CS 3 user. I scan oil paintings (with an Epson Perfection 1650) and usually get satisfactory results. But in one scan, the white and off white highlights are too strong. I want to dull/darken them without affecting any of the midtones and darktones. Playing with the Highlight Amount and Tonal settings in the Shadow/Highlight Image Adjustment is a semi answer. But is there a way to just change the lightest highlights without affecting anything else?
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You would get better reproduction of oil paintings and other images on textured substrates if, instead of scanning them, you photographed them with a digital camera using off-axis lighting (normally placed at 45° to the subject from each side).
I agree with Ann that oil paintings (and other textured artwork) are generally copied most faithfully if you can control the light and reflections. This means a camera and light setup and careful placement to keep it parallel to the "film" plane of the camera. Maybe a polarizer. And certainly use a good single focal length lens, such as a macro lens, to avoid pincushion and barrel distortion. It’s what museums would do.
If you must use a scanner, try rotating the painting on the scanner bed and scan again.
In addition to Ann and Neil’s points you’ll get far more dead on accurate color as well as capture even more color detail in the painting shooting and processing in raw with a DSLR.
The fluorescent light source of flatbed scanners aren’t the best when it comes to getting accurate color. You can’t calibrate the scanner for paintings because there are no calibration targets and digital source reference file to work out all the color spikes that occur scanning paint with a fluorescent light source.
There are only calibration targets for film positives and silver halide photographic paper.
I’ve gotten very good results shooting my own custom calibration target set next to my display so I can adjust by in ACR shooting with my DSLR. I save the preset and all other subjects shot under the same lighting and exposure parameters are all dead on accurate using the ACR preset built from the calibration target.
You can’t calibrate the scanner for paintings because there are no calibration targets and digital source reference file to work out all the color spikes that occur scanning paint with a fluorescent light source.
I believe there are standardized targets and software for calibrating scanners — I’m sure a card of color patches and calibration software came with a couple of scanners I had a few years ago. And scanner software allows you to customize settings, although there is a certain amount of trial and error.
That said, photography of the paintings with, say, an X-Rite ColorChecker chart for calibration would be best.
Your experience calibrating a scanner for accurate reproduction of fine art paintings off a flatbed is different from mine.
For me it required a lot of selective color editing where I basically had to reconstruct the color table for each scan. And this after calibrating using an it8 target.
With my Pentax K100D DSLR shooting raw I don’t even use a ColorChecker. I get more accurate results just switching to Adobe Standard profile in ACR and tweak the HSL panel by eye one time, save as a preset and apply to the rest of the series of images shot under the same conditions. Very quick and much more accurate results.
I have the DNG Profile Editor CCchart Wizard built profile but it’s not as accurate as Adobe Standard.
The ACR team got the profiles for Pentax DSLRs spot-on from the get go (*istD in ACR 2.x), no doubt thanks to Pentax providing information and being a lot more helpful than Canon and Nikon.
