The worldwide growth of the PC industry, desktop publishing and the use of the Internet has dramatically increased the demand for clear digital images.
Digital ICE works by building a record of defects in the image during scanning. Scanners normally work with three input channels - red, green, and blue. Scanners equipped with Digital ICE add a fourth channel called the D channel (defect channel). During scanning information on defects, surface dirt, and scratches is collected. Digital ICE then applies a series of algorithms (formulas) to rebuild the missing information. The result is scans that are scratch free and dust free even if the original film has serious defects. 

Digital ICE does not work with traditional black and white films and there will be a loss of detail when used with Kodachromes.

Does it look ok?

All scanners will interpret color differently. The age and quality of your scanner will greatly affect the final scan. We commonly receive scans from customers where the colors are greatly skewed such as orange skin tones, underexposed shadows, highlights blown out, etc. If your scans don't look right on your monitor, they probably won't look right when printed either. Your best bet is to just send us your prints.

Warm It Up!

Just as athletes warm up before a game, you should warm up your scanner lamp for at least 5 minutes before you begin scanning, even if your scanner indicates that it's ready in a couple of minutes. A proper warm-up is particularly important for scanning graphics, because the quality (as reflected in the color temperature) and consistency (seen in the absence of flicker) of the light affects the accuracy of your colors and exposure.

Find your Scanners sweet Spot.

Basically, you place a sheet of paper in your scanner and scan the entire bed at 72-100 dpi. In Photoshop, use the image/adjust/Equalize command to exaggerate the differences in the scan and the resulting image will give you a good idea of where your scanner's sweet spot is!
All flatbed scanners have minor inconsistencies in their scanning mechanisms. It should then come as no surprise that there are areas within the imaging area of your scanner that are better than others. If possible, you should place your image within this "sweet spot" to obtain the best and most consistent scans.
Step 1 To determine your own sweet spot simply make a scan of the entire image area using a clean white surface to scan. Set the resolution low,72 ppi to 100 ppi. There is no need for a large scan here!
Step 2 Once in Photoshop, use the Equalize command to exaggerate any minor differences within the image area. As you can see, this scanner has dark spots on the edges as well as a bright streak on the left. In addition, it has a blochy area about 11" down.
Reason: lack of equal quality throughout in the glass.

SOME THINGS TO AVOID

NO JPEGS. JPEGs are images that have been stripped of some of their detail in order to make them smaller. They’re fine for some purposes but are totally wrong for scanning. Do not save your scanned images as JPEGs. Save small scans as BMPs if you use Windows, or TIFFs if you use a Mac; save large ones as compressed TIFFs on Windows or Macs. Never save them as JPEGs. Once you create a JPEG, you can’t get the quality back; it’s thrown away. Don’t do it.

Adjusting the scan In Photoshop do not use the Brightness/Contrast, Auto Contrast, Auto Levels, these are destructive tools. You lose information by using them, conseqently if the image needs adjusting at a later date you are working with a damaged file.

Resampling up. (ie. enlarging from a scan made for the web 72ppi). Don’t do this, unless there’s no other way. This causes what’s called interpolation -- in other words, it means that when you enlarge the image, Photoshop tries to compensate for the pixels that might be missing, and this can result in a lot of degeneration of your image. In other words, it can wind up blurry, fuzzy, and looking pretty bad. A common problem with images taken off the web.

Bit:
Short for binary digit, the smallest unit of information on a machine. A single bit can hold only one of two values: 0 or 1. The higher the depth, the more colors are stored in an image. With 8 bit color, there is a total of 256 colors available. With 16 bit color, a total of 65536 is available.

For more information go to the Histogram and levels lesson in the photoshop tutorials

 

16 bit mode versus 8 bit mode.16 bit files are a lot better to work with, so if you can always scan in 16 bit mode. 16 bit files can take many edits and still have lots of information to spare when converting back to 8 bit mode, whereas the same edits in 8 bit will leave big hole in the information. But remember when you have finished to convert back your file to 8 bit mode.This is because most image editing programmes cannot handle 16 bit files. Photoshop lets you do some things in 16 bit but not all. Also most page layout software ie In-Design QuarkXpress etc do not handle 16 bit files.