I need help, please! I have an Epson Perfection V550 scanner and have started working my way through my mom's slide collection. However, I have encountered a strange problem. The photos themselves are square in the slide, but the scanner doesn't recognize some of them as squares, as you can see in the screen shot below. All the photos are square on the scanner, but the scanner has recognized one as square, two as portrait orientation, and one as landscape orientation, and in the process cut off significant parts of the photos! All the slides are the same direction. I don't understand the "Destination" section of the settings. I can't change the document size or the target size. Every time I try to change them, they automatically reset. What am I doing wrong???
It looks similar to a scanner I have used. The image size is what it senses it to be (or a default?). The target size is the shape and size of the jpg it will create. It is set to copy the original size. Have you tried clicking the Configuration... button? There might be a choice there to set a default size.
Just one question... though I don't have the scanner/printer... To make them square, shouldn't the Width and Height be the same number? One has .99 and the other has 1.26 on both the Image Type and Target Size. Either way, I hope it's an easy fix, Melanie!
I can't help but I can empathise! I love having my Dad's old slides but scanning them does my head in Hope you can work out the fix
I had the same scanner and have run into this problem before. I couldn't solve it either, although I think Jen is right the width and height should be the same. Also, possibly turn off the trimming option? I seem to remember that I swapped out the slides causing the problem and scanned them individually. For whatever reason, that seemed to work.
Frustrating! I know when I had issues scanning them in, it was the slide itself, so I'm NO help. The slides had degraded and where the photo was faded or the color was off, it detected the wrong size.
I hadn't thought about that! I double-checked the slides and to my eyes, it doesn't look like it has degraded at all, but I will keep that in mind!
The strange part is that the trimming option keeps resetting itself! I can't change any of the settings before hitting preview, and when I try to change Trimming to off before scanning, it automatically resets itself! So frustrating. Also, I tried the one photo at a time, and that didn't work for me. I will keep trying that, though!
You would think that! That's the logical answer, but I can't change any of the settings before hitting Preview. So I can't tell the scanner what size slide to look for. I can only change those size after the scanner has decided that they are not squares! It makes no sense and is so frustrating!
That's the really strange part - the Configuration setting only gives the option "Medium Format Film Size" and it's set to 6x6, so it should recognize the slides as square!
Thank you all so much! I have tried your suggestions, but nothing seems to work. I don't know what it is I'm missing or not doing right. I don't know where else to look for help. I can't find much information on using this scanner to scan slides! There's a lot about film & negatives, but not slides!
i'm not going to be any help but your troubles have made me appreciate my relatively easy Canon scanner now... i remember the scanning process of shoeboxes worth of these a few years back and i think we just laid a bunch on at a time and manually trimmed them in PS - is that an option?
Don't know if this will help but, Have you tried laying a sheet of black paper over the slides so it can tell where one ends and the other starts?
Ohh - I like this idea. The scanner I use has an overlay that blacks out everything but the one slide. Although, if you over the film part it might get really confused. Worth a try...
Problem solved! And the answer is so simple, I'm embarrassed I didn't figure it out earlier. After watching yet MORE videos about scanning negatives, I finally stumbled on someone scanning negatives who had the same problem I did with my slides. Thank you so much, everyone, for taking the time to comment in this thread! I really appreciate your help & your suggestions! *** If anyone comes to this thread in the future with the same kind of problem, here's the solution: On the righthand side in "Preview," I was viewing the slides in "Thumbnail." Instead, I should have clicked on "Normal." In "Normal" preview, the slides are scanned as squares & I can draw boxes around the parts that I want to be scanned. And bonus: the boxes don't move! So I can take out the 4 slides, put in a new set, and the boxes are still there. This has significantly cut down on scanning time! It now takes 1h 22min to get through a box of 51 slides, which I'm calling a win compared to the previous method of taking days to get through a box, because I was constantly playing with the slides to get them to appear square in the Preview.
Glad you could figure it out and save yourself so much time (and for posting the solution as a potential help to others!)
wow, that was a tricky fix - i would never have thought to change something in that preview dialogue box. so glad you finally found a solution and good luck on your project Melanie!
