Scanning Transparencies for publishers

I am photographing fitted furniture in Medium Format for a manufacture to use for advertisements in magazines. Is there any difference in scanning transparency film and saving to a CD compared to taking the photo digitally and saving to CD. I am not concerned about which has the best quality but would the file type and size etc be different?

It's just that I was told recently that some publishers will only accept digitally photographed files and not film scans. Is this Bull S#!T ?

I only use film so am I at a disadvantage?

Thanks,
Peter

It sounds like BS.

general Advice on scanning would apply (scan at highest res, in largest colour space, CC, spot and resize copies as needed).

Most publications will want the image in CMYK (v. RGB) using a profile of (SWOP v. your standard RGB) and to their requested size or larger. You should also supply a print for matching colour and I generally supply 2 folders, one labeled CMYK with all the images in it (logically named wigetdetail_left.tif) and a second labeled RGB containing RGB variants of the same files. I do this because on a rare occassion the publisher needs to go back to the source and reconvert the image.

If I'm not sure about size and because I have confidence with my resizing, I will create small, medium, and large versions of the files. Converting the images to CMYK is the last thing I do. All image editing should be done in RGB.

Sorry if this is a bit pedantic.

thefizz said:

I am photographing fitted furniture in Medium Format for a manufacture to use for advertisements in magazines. Is there any difference in scanning transparency film and saving to a CD compared to taking the photo digitally and saving to CD. I am not concerned about which has the best quality but would the file type and size etc be different?

It's just that I was told recently that some publishers will only accept digitally photographed files and not film scans. Is this Bull S#!T ?

I only use film so am I at a disadvantage?

Thanks,
Peter

Click to expand...

In case you had not thought of this yourself:
You might want to check if you can get your trannies drum scanned. Flatbed scanning today may be a lot better than it was a few years ago, but most pro's that we know, get all their stuff done professionally by a lab. Flatbed scanning is mostly done through glass, which is detrimental to your image quality.

OTOH, a lot depends on what quality the client expects and what he pays you

For the rest, I agree with what mrcallow said about supplying stuff on a CD.

Try to use a nice set of advanced photoshop filters for fast tweaking, like e.g. PowerRetouche. Photoshop sharpening filters are not the best. PowerRetouche has nice features, like changing the exposure and controlling black definition.

Tip: use 'sharpen' as your last step. We downsizes files first and sharpen after that step before saving it.

They probably don't want photographers to scan their work because of the range (from good to horrible) of scan quality that they've seen. Like the flatbed vs. drum... I could see people trying to save a few bucks by doing it themselves on cheap equipment.

In their defence, they're probably just trying to eliminate some variables for quality scans in their mind. Theoretically the same size and colour spaces would be the same, but the quality COULD be vastly different.

You mentioned "that you were told that some publishers...". But you didn't mention if THIS job follows under these rules...

joe

Thank you all for your help.

It's all a bit double dutch to me and I do not have a good quality scanner or Photoshop so I will get my lab to scan my trannies.


Peter