--- John Whittingham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm about to digitally archive my negs and slides from the past 25+ years. > I've got the use (long term) of a Minolta Dimage Scan Dual and a late version > of Vuescan, I'm familiar with the interface and I've been experimenting with > the options available. Currently scanning at 48 bit TIFF, max resolution > (8+mp) are there any alternatives available (software wise)? Would I be > better scanning RAW? Any advice much appreciated before I > start the job :)
SilverFast does a good job too, but I prefer Vuescan's algorithms. And Vuescan is cheaper, can handle a ton of different scanners if you decide to move to a different scanner at some point. I use it to drive both a Minolta SDII and an Epson 2450. 48bit TIFF (with LZW compression if you want to save space) and the maximum optical resolution of the scanner are good (I am not sure of the optical resolution of the Scan Dual, I have a Scan Dual II and I know that's 2820ppi). Practice with a few scans first to get a feel for using the controls on the Color tab to adjust white point, black point and brightness, get into the ballpark. Remember that the goal of scanning negatives or slides is to obtain as much GOOD data as possible in order to enables image processing afterwards. I never expect a scan to be perfect, it's just getting me the data I need to then edit and finish with Photoshop. A couple of tips: - If you batch up your negs/slides into groups with similar characteristics, you can then batch scan with one set of settings more efficiently (up to strips of 6 negs or 4 slides with that scanner, I believe). - If you want, you can tell Vuescan to save an index file along with the scans. This will generate a horribly big .BMP file with thumbnails in it, but you can open that with Photoshop and make it into a JPEG. The index pages can be printed and used as a proof sheet to help with filing the physical negatives. The advantage to scanning and saving RAW files in Vuescan is that it will do much like a RAW format in a camera ... dump the scanner's raw data out to a file ... which can then be reprocessed many times with different rendering settings to get a better scan. Much better than re-scanning the originals many times, and a lot quicker. Of course, it costs more time and space to save RAW files. Whether its worth it to you only you can decide. (A lot of my negatives are archived digitally as a Vuescan RAW file, a 48bit TIFF-LZW file, and an index page per roll of film.) Scanning is a slow and tedious process, but I like having archive copies of my negatives and prints that I can replicate losslessly and manage electronically. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
