Creating perfect photos from slide and negative scans with ColorPerfect: ColorQuartet, ScanMate, EskoScan

Increase the quality of your slide and negative scans from ColorQuartet with ColorPerfect! Find out more about how to scan with your ScanMate or EskoScan. ColorPerfect processes scans with color integrity and gives unprecedented flexibility in creative image editing. To harness the full potential of our Photoshop Plug-in it's important to obtain image data that has been subjected to as little processing as possible (RAW data). The following tutorial gives a step by step explanation on how to achieve this with ColorQuartet.

Creating linear scans of slides and negatives with ColorQuartet

  To create linear scans with ColorQuartet you first have to define your input on the "Preview Setup" panel. Never activate "Negative" as any negative scans that are intended to be processed in ColorPerfect's ColorNeg mode later on have to be created in a way preserving the negative. When scanning color negatives you need to choose the options "Transmission" and "Color" as if you were scanning slides. For black and white negative film choose "Transmission" and "Gray Scale". Then press the "Preview" button to start scanning the preview.

After the preview scan finishes the "Scan Setup" panel becomes available. On it choose "TIFF RGB Raw 16 Bit" under "File Format" and turn off the unsharp masking option. Any sharpening required can be done in Photoshop later on where you have more control over the sharpening process. In the "Color Definition" section of the panel choose "None" from the "Correction Profile" pull down menu. Doing so will disable all other options in this section.
The remaining options can be set as you see fit. Select your crop and define the size of the desired output using the settings under "Enlargement & Ruling" which are not shown here. Set your output file name and commence scanning using the "Ready To Scan" button.

ColorQuartet is provided for Howtek and Purup-Eskofot scanners of the ScanMate and EskoScan product lines.

To conclude we'd like to thank our user Sverre Aurstad cordially for providing us with the screen shots and instructions used on this page.