Krueger Photography

I’ve been scanning prints as part of my gallery upgrade project. I’m creating new galleries with higher resolution JPGs to replace my old galleries of lower resolution JPGs. Most of those prints are back from when I was printing non-display prints on glossy RC paper, but I also printed some new ones on Pearl paper, my current paper of choice, which has a texture and that’s where things started going down hill…

The Pearl Paper Nightmare

I was using an Epson V600 scanner with Epson Scan software, but when I tried to scan in very dark low key prints, the surface texture was starkly visible in the scans making them virtually unusable by my standards. While the entirety of my Huntsville Alabama gallery comes from scans of Pearl paper, the new scans were 600 dpi instead of 300dpi. Maybe the higher resolution made the texture more obvious or possibly I just became more aware of the texture in the scans.

I tried the techniques I found on the internet. I tried FFT and gave up pretty quickly because random texture of pearl paper doesn’t lend itself to mathematical characterization. I also tried combining a straight scan with a scan of the print rotated by 180 degrees and that looked fairly promising. I may revisit that. I also used my D850 to copy the prints, but B&W JPGs are only 8-bits and I’m just too damn lazy to use 14-bit RAW. Then I came across an old blog article about wet scanning prints and gave it a try. The results were outstanding. Sure, a little messy, but not as time consuming as you’d think and the texture completely disappeared. Yay!

Wet Scanning Textured Darkroom RC Prints

Before retirement, I was an engineer, so I consider myself to have a reasonable level of intelligence. Looking at the V600 scanner glass, it seemed pretty well sealed, but if some water infiltrated under the glass, surely I would be able to spot it. But, that’s not what happened. Nope.

I was careful to keep the water mopped up as I was placing the very wet prints on the glass and rolling them flat. I never once saw so much as a drop fall into the scanner enclosure. What the water did do, however, is creep under the back edge of the glass and become trapped between the glass and a hidden half inch wide strip of white tape known as the “Calibration Strip” (imagine those two words being spoken by a loud echoey god-like voice), resulting in scans that were no longer of uniform exposure. So, I opened the scanner and saw the problem immediately, but the glass is attached with adhesive and not easily removeable, so I used a hair dryer to gently warm up the glass covering the strip to see if I could get the water to evaporate. After an hour or so, I gave up and left it alone for about a week and checked it again and found no discernable improvement

Okay, I learned a hard lesson, right?. I would just have to get a new scanner. The V600 cost me $220 on Amazon in 2019. I’ll just bite the bullet and get a new one, I thought. Of course, the price probably went up a little in 6 years. But, instead they went out of production. So, naturally, I panicked.

NOTE: While there were no new V600s or V850s and no refurb units at the time, the Epson website does list the V600 new for $300 now (Aug 19, 2025).

New Affordable Photo Scanners Have Gone Extinct

So, apparently something happened to the photography industry that killed the photo scanner market. Someone told me they make cameras now that completely skip the film-to-print-to-scanner-to-JPG process, giving you a JPG file right from the camera. Don’t worry. I didn’t believe it for a minute.

WHile I would have been fine with a refurb unit, I wasn’t interested in buying used and te only scanner readily available new was the Epson 13000XL from B&H for $4400. There was no way I was going to spend that much on a scanner. But, then my wife mentioned that the throughput on a scanner that size (30 slides at a time) would be great for her plan to scan about 80 years of old family photos. And, since I’m not the kind of guy who argues with his wife, that’s what we have now.

NOTE: Since I bought the 13000XL on July 15th, the price has gone up to $5000.

Epson 13000XL and SilverFast AI

The Epson 13000XL, which weighs only slightly less than my Miata, actually brings out the surface texture of the pearl paper more than the V600. It shows up as a bazillion tiny bright white specks in the darker areas of the print. The scanner came with SilverFast AI software which I didn’t even open for several days after the scanner arrived. But, when I did, I was pleasantly surprised to find that its SRDx function is good at removing the white specks leaving only a much more subtle dark texture behind. SRDx allows you to highlight the defects that it detects in a preview window so you can see the magnitude of the problem, plus it allows you to click back and forth so you can see what happens to the image when you turn the SRDx function on and off facilitating adjustments that maximizes defect correction without blurring the image. I’ve found that scanning at 1200 dpi and then scaling the JPG down to 300 dpi works best. It doesn’t eliminate the texture, but it makes it manageable.

No, I don’t get anything in return for touting any businesses or products on this site. It’s just pure honest opinion and it isn’t always positive.

Glossy Paper Solves the Problem, Right?

Gone are the days of single weight FB prints and the drum dryers that dried them nice and flat. I have printed thousands of RC prints on both premium and budget paper in my life. The only reason I tend to prefer premium papers is that they have a good Dmax. Unlike many of commenters on the analog photo forums, I think Dmax matters. A lot. I selenium tone everything I print, RC or FB, to squeeze out as much Dmax as I can get. That’s not to say you can’t get a good print without it, but you can’t get the best possible print without it, which is not to say I have ever made a “best possible” print.

Since I now realize that Glossy prints scan much better than Pearl, I decided to test one of the budget brands of RC paper. It was so cheap, I couldn’t not at least try a 25 sheet pack. The paper didn’t have a great Dmax, but for scanning, who cares? So I ordered a 250 sheet box. But then I printed a negative that needed a higher contrast filter and had large areas of gray and black and was confronted by visible mottling. The scanner picked it up and there is no such thing as a mottling removal function with any scanner or editing software. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And then you start looking for it and realize why it’s called “budget paper”. I cancelled the 250 sheet order before it was shipped.

Since the resulting scans of that paper were unusable, I don’t actually have a sample to show in this post, but Adrian Lambert posted about it on FADU and included an example that clearly shows the problem. I looked through a lot of old prints and have not seen this as a problem in the past even with Adorama and Kentmere branded papers. I think the mottling is controllable in manufacturing and can be reduced, but only at a cost, which makes me wonder if this will ever find its way into premium papers brands due to cost saving pressures. After cancelling the 250 sheet order of budget paper, I ordered 100 sheets of Ilford Cooltone RC Glossy which hasn’t arrived yet. I will test it immediately when it arrives, hopefully relieving my concerns.

NOTE: I have not detected mottling on any of my FB prints, but I have since found the mottling to occur on this low cost RC paper even when printing with lower contrast filters in areas that are not so dark.