Canon's CanoScan FS4000

Version 1.2, Page 5, ©2001 by Dale Cotton, all rights reserved

Colour and Tonal Gradations, continued

Both curves push shadow brightness far past the point I would ever use. The point is simply to show that there is plenty of detail waiting to be tapped as needed. Now here is the same adjustment applied to an HP S20 scan:

Figure 10. S20 scan with brighness adjustment.

I'm impressed; and I have to wonder whether these FS4000 results are representative of a 3.4 Dmax or whether Canon's Dmax figure is actually too conservative.

Figure 11. Original vs. Figure 12. Adjusted.

Here's another shot taken a few minutes earlier.

Figure 11 is original scan. Notice how the picture is exposed for the sky, putting the ground in deep darkness. Figure 12 is the result of taking advantage of the FS4000's Dmax, I am able to add a neutral density filter after the fact, in software! An extreme curve is applied to the ground but not the sky. And, maybe I'd better clarify that my tongue is in my cheek here: the curve is much too extreme to produce print-worthy results. Usable results of this sort are perfectly obtainable by scanning at two different exposure settings then merging the results.

Noise

Dmax is only as useful as the amount of digital noise (random colour dots) in the shadows (and elsewhere) permits. You can get some idea of how much noise there are in the FS4000's scans from the previous 100% crops. Beyond that I refer you to the new noise and shadow detail section of Norman Koren's review.