Hi all,
I have fought with the task for the last several months, and finally decided to ask on this forum.
I need to reproduce graphics made by charcoal and black ink. They are in A3 format. I scan it wit my Epson V500 in 1200 dpi resolution (2xA4 and merge) to 280 MPix 16bit greyscale scan and then print it with my inkjet printers in 1:1 scale (to be enlarged in the future). There is a lot of playing with levels and gamma during scan and then processing in PS. The results sometimes are more then satisfactory, sometimes are really poor, especially when a lot of mid-grey shades appear in the scan. Finally, the result is printed on Epson Hot/Cold Press papers in ABW (QTR will be used in the future). All parts done in GreyGamma 2.2.
I would like to have a print which would be very similar to the original drawing. After try and error phase now I would like to do it in more objective way. I have V500 scanner used with Epson software, Kodak greyscale 19 patch step-wedge reference, Epson 3880 and P800 printers, x-rite spectro (CM) and quite a lot of Epson cotton Press papers. I tried to put some corrections after neutral scan (0-255 levels, no gamma correction in scanner software) in PS curves after measuring the original reference and the 1st print but result is not satisfactory.
The original artwork L range starts at L*=20 up to the white point of the paper so it should be reproduced with no problem on both printers. Linearity is a problem. I would appreciate any ideas that could help me in this linearisation scan-to-print problem. Many thanks in advance!