Jones

Beautiful soft autumn light. Velvia works well with this light. I sure miss the spectacular leaves of New England and New York. John, I think the version you posted is a bit over-sharpened.

@Kodachromeguy would that be the "unsharp mask" check box in the Epson V-600 app?

Hi John, it might be the unsharp mask. See if you can turn it off. I have read, and learned the hard way, that it is best to not sharpen at all when you scan the original media. Sharpen afterwards if you want to using any popular image software. I scan my Hasselblad negatives on an old Minolta Scan Multi scanner, which needs a SCSI card and, therefore, an old Dell computer running WIN 7. I learned to not do any sharpening at all at this initial stage.

@Kodachromeguy Thanks for the tip !! I will try it and compare the scans.

Another tip that I learned from a fellow named Adrian Bacon here at APUG was to scan at the native resolution of the scanner. You can probably read in the specs what the native is for your V600. Then resize later if you want smaller files. Here is a pertinent conversation:

Hello Adrian, I have three questions if you have time.
1. I have a similar question as noted by Pridbor above. When I scan B&W or color negative film with a Plustek 7600i scanner (135 film) or a Minolta Scan Multi (120 film), I see grain but no obvious random noise. Am I just not seeing it?
2. The Silverfast software lets me do multi scans on the Plustek (not specified, possibly 2 times?) and 2, 4, 8, or 16 times on the Scan Multi. I usually do multi and 4x, but am not fully convinced that there is any benefit. What do you recommend?
3. What is the native resolution that you mentioned above? Is it the maximum resolution that the software lets you set? On the Minolta Scan Multi, I always use 2820 dpi, which is the max. On the Plustek, I use 3600 dpi. I have tried 7200 dpi (the max), but I am not sure if I am seeing any more actual data, just larger size grain.
Thanks!!

1. Whether or not you see noise will depend how it was scanned and what you’re scanning. If scanning negatives, the noise won’t be where you think it is. It’ll be in the highlights/whites, not the shadows/blacks, but only on films that have a lot of density. If scanning black and white, it’ll be luminance noise, in which case don’t worry about it as it’s not very objectionable. If scanning slides, the noise will show up in the shadows/blacks as chroma/color noise. If you don’t see any, you either have a very good scanner, or something, somewhere along the way is removing it.

2. I wouldn’t bother. If you’re scanning at 16 bits and are already scanning where clear film base plus fog is just below sensor clip, you’ll already be getting excellent DMAX. Unless whatever you’re scanning has extraordinary density, the scanner should be able to handle it without much problem unless it’s crap. My 14 bit dslr handles slide film dynamic range with room to spare. A scanner with a 16 bit ADC should be able to stomp on it in the dynamic range department.

3. You’ll have to look it up. I think the plustek is natively 7200 dpi. Don’t know about the other one. Avoid interpolated resolution. Scanning at the native sensor resolution isn’t really about getting more resolution as they’re all optically limited to one degree or another, it’s about not prematurely limiting what you’re going to capture early in the chain, and keeping the software out of the way as much as possible early in the chain to avoid inadvertently doing not so great things to the image quality, like only sampling every other pixel off the sensor to get the lower resolution. That sort of stuff introduces all kinds other image quality problems. The easiest and simplest way to avoid all of that is to scan at the native sensor resolution and bit depth, then scale down later. That being said, just because you can’t see more detail doesn’t mean the scanner isn’t capturing more detail. If it’s below 50% contrast response, you’ll be hard pressed to see it without applying some processing to dig it out. At any rate, you tend to get better results by scanning at the native resolution, then scaling down to a “house format” for archival, it helps to give the lower resolution archival format a bit more fine detail and helps to reduce any noise that may be present. You’re basically oversampling when you do that, and I’ve yet to see anybody publish anything that shows that oversampling is to be avoided. Also, the different colors will capture different amounts of spatial resolution, the red channel the least, the blue channel the most.

Nice one! Cemeteries do look different in different regions and this reminds me of home. (there are also Jones in my family tree, but by marriage)