MorseBlog

Introduction I wanted to make some notes and comments on scanning of film. I have been mostly self taught since I started in 2009 with my brother's archive that I wanted to create a book from. I had a basic scanner for 35mm film and slides and used the included SW and Photoshop Elements 6. I could not and still cannot justify in my own mind a full-blown Photoshop license. I got reasonably good results. I learned the importance of cleaning dust before scanning as this saves a lot of time touching them up in Photoshop. (Some of his slides were filthy.) I scanned as TIFF files as these don't suffer losses from compression like JPG. I also tried scanning at a high resolution like 4000 DPI. I thought of myself as making archival scans as a result. The idea being to scan to capture all the information and then make modifications from that in Photoshop. What I did not understand was the degree to which the scanner SW was making changes to make the scan 'better'. Eventual...

I got back for the lab a large set of negatives from my most recent trip to the Llyn Peninsula . I was excited as I anticipated there may be a handful of decent images. I quickly set about scanning them. Since they were all taken with either my Fuji G617 or the Fuji GSW690iii I decided to scan them at 3200 dpi. (There is some debate as to the value of scanning beyond 2400 dpi on some scanners and higher resolution begets slower scanning in any case.)  I had also recently purchase a BetterScanning medium format film holder and anti-newton glass insert as part of my drive to up my game in terms of scanning and image quality. Focus Height Before I could use my BetterScanning I decided I should make sure I had the film holder at the optimal height. There are a number of nylon screw feet that can be used to raid it from its default 1mm height. Finding a sharp image is the first challenge. I settled on my barrel cactus photo I used in the last round of experiments. I took a series o...

Since the purchase of ColorPerfect/ColorNeg I have had to revise (and improve) my scanning work flow. I have also purchased and read Alex Burke' book Film in a Digital Age . It is a good book and at 180 pages worth the $20.00 if you practice a hybrid film digital work flow. Lots of practical tips. Alex's photos I think speak for themselves. Interestingly the two scanning flows are somewhat different and I wanted to compare them. I normally use Vuescan which can be unclear sometimes but has lots of controls. For instance I have scanned for 48-bit color for a very long time. It was only after using ColorNeg that I discovered all my scans were saved as 24-bit files. This is because there are separate scanning and saving options. The tutorials with ColorNeg straightened all this out. These experiments relate to color negative flow. Alex on the other hand uses EpsonScan and then Photoshop. Reading his scanning flow I decided to see what differences there might be. The recommende...