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February 9, 2008
My Scanning Workflow
This stack represents about 2/3 of the slides that I have gone through in the last several days. In addition to this was a box containing another thousand or so loose slides. Fortunately, the majority of the slides went straight into the garbage. What remains are slides I definitely want to scan and some that I might want to scan. I kept most slides with familiar faces in them and trashed the scenic shots.
Now that I have "only" a couple thousand scanning candidates, the real work begins. Slides are loaded into a mounted film holder - usually three or four at a time. A preview scan is made. This gives me some idea how much tweaking I'll need to do. If I'm lucky, the slide will be in good shape and will not have faded too much. If the slide is an E-6 process film like Ektachrome or Fujichrome, I have the option of using digital ICE to greatly reduce the amount of dust-spotting I will have to do later. (ICE does not work on Kodachrome slides or black and white negatives.) If the slide has faded over the years, Nikon's digital ROC can be utilized to restore much of the slide's original color. After making these adjustments, it''s time to do another preview scan. When things are looking good, I scan at the scanner's highest resolution and bit depth. This produces a file approximately 120 megabytes in size, but gives me the most latitude for the work I'll do next.
So far, all of the steps have been performed "in the background". By that I mean while doing other things like working on this blog entry, responding to a ton of fan e-mail or even working on previously scanned images in PhotoShop. It's a good thing that it's possible to do this, or I'd never get anything else done. Scanning a single image this way can take up to 30 minutes. I'd rather not spend the next 2,000 hours on this project.
Finally, I open the scanned images in PhotoShop and use it's power to do the final tweaks. Usually this involves a visit to the Levels, Color Balance, and Hue controls. There is almost always some dust-spotting needed. Finally, the image is sharpened and sized for e-mailing. I have a PhotoShop Action for this, since pretty much the same steps get applied to all of my images.
Of course, I am painfully aware that the "best" way to maintain image fidelity would be to remove the slides from their holders, wet-mount them and have them drum scanned. I have had a few transparencies scanned this way by fellow SPAM'er, Kurt Krause, and these are the best-looking scans in my collection. Several of my Bali images including my "Bali Boys" shot was scanned in this way. But at $75.00 a pop, I'd have to take out a second mortgage on the loft.
Posted by thedude at February 9, 2008 9:42 AM
Comments
hey jim guess what? i am doing the same thing. i have already gone through 3 or 4 thousand slides. i found a place called scancafe. they do all the scanning and post them to a web site. it is 21 cents a slide. you can choose which ones you want saved to disk. then they mail them all back to you to do what you want with them. i get to see my first batch on the 20th. funny how people start the same projects. i had lots o photos of flowers that my father in law took. there must have been 50 carousels filled. it takes a month or so to see your stuff.
Posted by: myrna Staal at February 14, 2008 7:01 AM
When I scanned slides for my in-laws 50th wedding anniversary there were a million pictures of flowers that my father-in-law took while vactioning out west. Must have been the 'in' thing to take pictures of at the time.
Posted by: Cindy at February 14, 2008 8:09 AM
I'd really like to the results you get from Scan Cafe! Looks like only 3,000 dpi, but it is a Nikon 9000 ED scanner, so I'm intrigued. Nice of them to offer scanner purchasing advice on their web site!
Posted by: thedude at February 14, 2008 5:04 PM
It be nice to try. I'm sure they won't be as picky as you and I would be if we were doing it. But we could always tweak the image a bit once we get them back. I think this may be a nice way to digitalize the slides with out all of the time and effort!
Posted by: Cindy at February 14, 2008 8:29 PM
