Problem scanning in color

[MayL]

Hi there,

 

I have a Canon scanner (Lide300). It scans with the software perfectly to my iMac. But I'd like to use he "acquire image" option in Affinity photo directly. Unfortunately it only does so in black and white. When I choose the color option in Affinity it comes out like in the image attached.

Any idea what I can change to make this work? Or is it a problem with affinity?

 

Any help much appreciated

🙏🏽✨

[v_kyr]

34 minutes ago, MayL said:

Any idea what I can change to make this work? Or is it a problem with affinity?

Probably the later, as far as other macOS apps can get a correct color representation out of that via acquire image. - So you would for Affinity have to reroute the whole to file handling, aka scan with the scan driver & software and save the scan then as an image or PDF file, afterwards in Affinity import/open that file for further modifications/usage etc.

 

[Hangman]

Hi @MayL and welcome to the forums,

This is working correctly for me with my HP scanner so I'm a little unsure what to suggest here. There is clearly something very odd going on with the scan as the output appears to be repeating the bottom third of your illustration an additional two times... 🤔

Stating perhaps the obvious, have you tried to reboot both your Mac and your Scanner just to see if it makes any difference when using Acquire Image in Photo. Based on @Old Bruce's feedback below it sounds as though it may be a Canon Driver/Affinity Photo compatibility issue.

Which version of Photo 2 are you currently using?

 

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, MayL said:

Any idea what I can change to make this work? Or is it a problem with affinity?

I am seeing the same thing with my ancient Canon Scanner Printer. Colour doesn't seem to work, B&W does work. I think your best bet is to follow v_kyr's advice and just scan to a TIFF at 300dpi then import that image. Most likely a problem with the combination of Canon's drivers and the Apple OS and Affinity.

[MayL]

Hey everyone,

Thanks for the replies and welcome.

I bought the scanner and affinity 2.0 last week, so both brand new. Rebooting didn't work.

I could scan as a TIFF and import indeed, but I actually bought affinity because I want to make use of the image correction. The software of Canon only has one button basically. And since its artworks I want to upload, kind of relevant to get the colors right. 

Is there any way that this scanning problem can be solved by affinity?

 

[Old Bruce]

13 minutes ago, MayL said:

I could scan as a TIFF and import indeed, but I actually bought affinity because I want to make use of the image correction.

I could be wrong here as I do not have that model Canon scanner. But... I doubt that there would be any advantage other than ease of access to the scanner from within Affinity Photo. Meaning there wouldn't be any "better colours" or a "more pure image" compared to scanning to a 16 bit per channel TIFF or accessing the scanner from within Photo. 

Your desire to use Affinity Photo for image correction would be the same whether the image is scanned from within Photo or from the Canon driver software and Apple's Image Capture and saved as a 16 bit TIFF.

[v_kyr]

18 minutes ago, MayL said:

I could scan as a TIFF and import indeed, but I actually bought affinity because I want to make use of the image correction. The software of Canon only has one button basically. And since its artworks I want to upload, kind of relevant to get the colors right.

There should also be a more direct way via it's accompanied "J Scan Utility Lite" software & driver,  something like performing a custom scan and sending that to an defined application. Which finally would be similar like aquiring image ...

    

[MayL]

Thanks v_kyr! That works indeed

[thomaso]

This software / the manual appears to be quite interleaved structured, there seem to exist a few "Image Processing Settings" in the "Document" mode:

https://ij.manual.canon/ij/webmanual/ScanUtilityLite/M/3.1/EN/SUL/Sul-PAGE3.html
–>  https://ij.manual.canon/ij/webmanual/ScanUtilityLite/M/3.1/EN/SUL/sul-110.html

Whereas for a "good" scan software I would expect more quality options, for instance to adjust colours, contrast, in-/out values etc more specifically via curves or numerically.

Alternatively you can try other scan software. Just check if they support your scanner (or simply try) and make sure to download a macOS version if available. In this list there are at least a few mac compatible, according to the screenshots:

https://fixthephoto.com/best-free-scanner-software.html

[v_kyr]

9 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Whereas for a "good" scan software I would expect more quality options, for instance to adjust colours, contrast, in-/out values etc more specifically via curves or numerically.

Well that's an inexpensive (more absolute low-cost) scanner (starting at ~ €55.-) and thus reduced to an overall easy-of-use concept and so nothing professional here. So here you get what you pay for, especially in that cheaper price segment! - Further a very good scan software, with much more bells & whistles, costs nearly as much, or much more, than this hardware+software package costs's at all together! So I would not expect miracles from it's supplied software here, as the whole scanner package is meant for plain home users and more mere mortals here.