Going Digital

After much deliberation, Sue and I have made another move towards digital photography. We've purchased a Nikon Coolscan IV (so where's the pentax scanner?) and I reckon that gives us around 12.3 megapixels from our slides and negatives. We keep the pentax film cameras, we keep the true wide angle of the lenses and we keep an archival film copy of every photograph. When scanners get better, we can scan again.

The results so far are very encouraging, and now we can put to practical use all the tips we have been getting from our camera club digital nights. (Every Tuesday in addition to our regular Thursday night meetings at Atherton, near Manchester.)

Here's a tip: print a b/w portrait from the green channel only of an RGB file - it acts just like a green filter on b/w film and gives superb skin tones!

Hi John,

I too have been scanning for a while... First I had a Minolta Scan Dual, now a Nikon Coolscan IV. For both items I use VueScan which provides excellent colour management and batch control (http://www.hamrick.com). It's been well worth the $40 or so. As an added bonus it runs on Macs and Linux too.

In addition, I've been using NeatImage on the scans (http://www.neatimage.com). I bought it for noise removal on my Canon S30 pocket digital, but have found it superb on Nikon scans - you can create a really, really clean scan with almost no grain at all (and Provia 100 is good to begin with ) Mind you, you need a fast machine to NeatImage a 60Mb scan, and even then it takes 5 to 10 minutes. The results have been worth it though

It is true that 35mm/scan produces excellent digital format. However, there are still big advantages for pure digital. Digital is great for checking that you have that important shot perfectly captured before you leave the scene, and for just trying out new things without wasting film.

Personally, I love both formats - for their different strengths - and can see myself shooting in both for a long while to come.

Enjoy the scanning!
Matt

(If anyone needs comparison images... I'll sort some crops out. Just email me.)

Hi Matt

Thanks for the comments.

When you set up your Coolscan IV I wonder which colour space setting you chose, and why. I thought sRGB looked too severe and the wide gamut choices very flat, so opted for Adobe RGB on the logic that I was using Adobe Photoshop. I'd be interested to hear your own train of thought.

Hi John,

I use sRGB. However, in my experience with the Minolta, I found the colour rendition was severe, and lead to posterisation when trying to adjust the histograms in Photoshop. As soon as I started using Vuescan the results were miles better - and more controllable. (If you look at my "older work" gallery, they were all done with the Minolta. All the Z1 stuff is done with the Nikon, but reduced by 50% in each direction to reduce file sizes! )

Personally, I found the Nikon software interface rather non-intuitive, so I have (so far) stuck to using Vuescan. If you want to be really sure you get the scan it can store a 'raw' image direct from the CCD which allows you to reprocess the file without re-scanning (so therefore you can place it into any colour space you need even after scanning). In addition you can do multiple pass scanning to eke out the shadows and to minimise noise - it worked really well on the Scan Dual, but so far I've not needed it with the Coolscan.

What's good about VS is you can scan slides "as-is" as an image, or go for film colour correction to get the scene as shot. There are loads of film profiles - but mostly Kodak, and the older Fuji films. I usually shoot Provia, scan as "image", then sort things out in Photoshop. It's an easy work flow that has allowed me to scan a few thousand slides without any problem, and burn them onto DVD.

You can download a copy of Vuescan to try (it just puts diagonal lines across your image, so be sure to view it at 100% otherwise you get strange effects). Any bugs or problems are fixed within days - Ed Hamrick seems to bring out a new release every few days!

I cannot say that I have put any photos in for serious publication, but I've inkjetted them, had them printed by Jessop's digital service onto 10x8, placed them on the web, and used some in the company's literature. All in all, I've been very pleased with the results.

If I can offer any more comments, please don't hesitate to ask. Hope it helps,

Matt

John, and all,

One thing I forgot to mention when dealing with digital is having a calibrated monitor. If you have an LCD display this can be particularly difficult to get right.

When we bought our 17" LCDs for work I had to scoot around the 'net for ages before finding this:

http://www.praxisoft.com/pages/products.wiziwyg.html

"WiziWYG" from Praxisoft. It's free to use, and has a pretty easy setup that will allow you to calibrate for a particular colour temperature and the like. And works on LCDs!

Hope it helps someone out - it's been great for me
Matt

John,

Just an update on the colour space issue. I should have checked earlier (tchuch!). Just raked out one of my slides from a few years ago to rescan, and set up using VueScan 7.6.20... and I noticed that the sky on this shot was "Out of gamut color" in sRGB.

On VueScan, on the "Color" tab, you can tick "Pixel Colors" to show infrared defects, staturation points, and out of gamut. On the "File Color Space", Adobe RGB is much better, and Device RGB is perfect. So, I scanned in Adobe RGB for editing in PSE2.

Having done this there's a good level of detail in the slide and the histogram is PSE2 is well under control, but amazingly my old Dimage Scan Dual with Vuescan did a pretty excellent job too!

Enjoy!

Matt

Thanks for the help, Matt, much appreciated!

Hello again John

Just to update you on some information regarding colour spaces etc...

Have a look here for serious instructions http://www.spectrumphoto.co.uk/downloads%20page.htm
They are an excellent lab who do large format printing here in Brighton/Hove.

Also, I purchased "The Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements 2" by Richard Lynch (ISBN 0-7821-4178-1) which has a very good chapter on colour management. (It's available from Amazon and is brilliant for PSE1 & PSE2- adds curves, colour separations and the like, for £20.99.)

Really it boils down to this: sRGB is very good for web intent, while Adobe RGB 1998 is more suited for printing purposes.

From my own experience, I scan in Adobe RGB (and in the past sRGB), edit without colour management in PSE, and print. I have printed stuff from CD to the Fuji FDI equipment, and via the Pixology service to 8x10 with very good results. In addition, printing to my Epson Photo 870 on good Epson paper produces fantastic results every time. Very very rarely do I have a problem with colour matching (slight differences as you have to expect since printed output has a smaller gamut).

Regards,
Matt