Instant highlight and shadows effect
Even without the 3D effect enabled, you can get a subtle shadow and highlight effect by scanning your original with the left lamp in the ‘up’ position, and the right lamp in the ‘down’ position. This gives the image an instant look as if being lit from above.
Here it’s a small section of the blue and yellow test painting, scanned in 600 dpi with the lamps set that way (up/down):
Artwork test scan with HD Apeiron/42
Uniform light across the entire scan line
Just as you can emphasize shadows and highlights, it is also possible to minimize undesirable effects, as seen in this example with a watercolor where the badly prepped paper warps and buckles.
Right out of the scanner, with no post-editing at all, the image shows almost no differences in the white areas of the paper, despite the warping edges. By adjusting the 3D values you change how much light from which lamp is used in the final image – the higher the value, the bigger the highlight/shadow effect. Which number to end up with is often a matter of personal preference.
Left: 0, middle: +50, right: +100. Both lamps are set in the ‘down’ position: