Negative Scanner

adrian522

Hi,

Has anyone any experience of using film or negative scanners?

I am using canon 8400F and am finding it quite slow to get the hang of in relation to the settings.

Basically there are various options such as Unsharp Mask, Auto Tone , remove dust & scratches, fading correction, grain correction, backlight correction.

These settings obviously slow down the whole process and I'm not sure if there is any need to use them with the exception of the remove dust and scratches feature which seems to work very well.
It seems that all the rest can be quite easily corrected in photoshop.

Also the resolution goes up to 3200dpi, (about 4 megapixel) but i find that this too takes an awful long time. here any need to use this high resolution, I probably wont print anything larger than A4.....

DotOrg

to print 12in X 8in prints you should scan so you get an image at least 2400 x 3600 pixels

and yes,scanning is a slow process, if you know photoshop you can do things like tone and unsharp mask within it instead

roo_photo

As a rule of thumb its always better to apply things such as curves (shadow/midtones/highlights etc) to get the best amount of information into to the picture at the scanning stage - then at least the image editing software has more detail to work with.

That said, dust and scratch removal is one hell of a time saver, and usually does not mean much sacrifice in image quality (it sometimes softens the picture). The other filters might also work well (I dont know the scanner), but do the images really need it? As you say, its a toss up between extra time scanning or extra time in PS.

Resolution is good, as long as it is the optical resolution and not software interpolation, but humongous files are not fun. :eek: Same applies with colour depth, 16bit files tend to get large too. Most of this excess info tends to be simply chucked aside by the average printer anyway. If the picture needs a lot of work then use 16bit as it gives more material for the software to move around, otherwise stick to 8bit. 300dpi scan resolution is usually plenty for output to an inkjet printer (A4 is about 25 -30mb).

Next step is colour calibration, and in my experience, sleepless nights, hairloss, grinding of teeth, needless destruction of inanimate objects etc...:(

adrian522

The photos were all processed in India/Nepal which was a mistake as all the negatives are scratched....