An example from a scanner that needed repair

I wanted to share two slides that made it clear it was time to get a new scanner. Here’s the first one—old scanner on the left and new scanner on the right. 

At first glance, the one from the old scanner may look better because it’s brighter. But look at what is lost—the clouds, some pattern in the woman’s clothes, and skin tones that are too harsh. Here’s a detail.

Here’s the second example:

Again, at first glance, the image from the old scanner may look better. It has a lot of blue tones whereas the unedited image from the new scanner is a little grey.

What you’re seeing is the loss of a good range of highlights in the images. The brightness and sharpness that you see in the before pictures have obliterated the detail in the brighter parts of each image. The after pictures are unedited. The highlights are intact even right out of the scanner.

Like with film, you can always brighten up a dark image but if the image has lost detail in its highlights as these did with the old scanner, it is impossible to recover them.