tips for starter scanning negatives

Hello you all,

I made the discicion to buy one of the last available Coolscan V for digitizing my many old negatives and some slides. It arrives next week, I bought it with Silverfast 6.6 and a Kodak-AT-8 calibrationslide and hope to learn soon a fast workflow. I am used to devellop nice JPEG's from RAW-files with CS3 and have my monitor calibrated with Adobe Gamma. I do know how to use Camera RAW and Photoshop, new for me is preparing the negatives and slides for scanning and using the scanner and scan-software.

My analog material (filmstrips and slides) are op till 35 years old, I shot mostly common negatives (Kodak Color Gold and Fuji) and some Ektar 25.

Who can offer me usefull sugestions to avoid a long learning curve using my new stuff?

I hope the quality of the hardware and workflow leads to nice results that makes it attractive to use my old gear (analog old Pentaxes (K2, ME-super with nice primes) more often than I use it now. I stil love the old feeling using them. Playing with small depth of field is not good possible with my digicam (Sony R1), for that purposes I need a expensive full-frame DSLR that I can't afford.

To obtain nice scans, is it better to use positive or negative material and what brand and type do you advice? I get a Kodak calibration slide from Silverfast.

Cheers
Henricoo

Two questions using Silverfast

My scanner arrived last monday and I get very nice results out of it. I use Silverfast 6.6. on my Coolscan V and my workflow now is:

1. prescanning and optimize scannersettings with "auto-adjust" and twicking the overall brightness-slider for nice midtonescontrast

2. scanning the image on 4000 dpi and 14 bit colordepth with ICE-fine

3. after saving as TIFF postprocessing it in CS3 (I am familiair with that)

4. cropping to 2400 * 3600 format, converting to 8-bit and saving as high JPEG (5 - 8 Mb)

Two questions:

So far no problem, I only can't get the scanner doing this in a batch-job for filmstrips with 5 or six images. What am I doing wrong? Can anybody give me some stepwise advice how to do this?

For negatives I use "negative direct", works OK but I also can choose "negative". I get a menu then where I can select filmtype, ISO etc. When I use that I got a negative-scan result (orange) that needs to be converted. How can that be done and has this workflow advantages over using the "negative direct"-way when postprocessing in CS3 is used too?

I hope anybody can help me.

Henricoo

I've never liked the results I get with the Photoshop 'Invert' function. Instead I use a Photoshop plug-in for inverting negatives. Information and examples are here:

www.colorneg.de/oldneg.html?lang=en

Hi

Well first I'd suggest a quick look through Scantips.com, then if you're comfortable with all that I'd say to look carefully at what your scanner does at the shoulder and toe of the negatives. I recommend you split the colour channels and inspect them carefully. I have found that most "negative" sections for scanner are just that wee bit agressive at setting black and white points. I prefer to adjust things my way, so I find that scanning a negative as a positive and then working with it in photoshop preferable. I typically do something like:

1. prescan as positive
2. set black and white points for each or R G and B
3. scan into photoshop
4. assign the maker profile for that scanner (cos my working space is often ProRGB)
5. invert
6. alter levels still leaving a little breathing space
7. use curves to bring the toe and shoulder levels in to line
8. sometimes an AutoColour works well at this point (NB: not if you're using layers).

It takes a little time to get the hang of it. I've put a few of the thoughts about this on this page. Which eventually led me to what I wrote on this page.


Then I'd say look at your colour profiles, I found that for my Epsons that I need to assign the profile (it it isn't my default working space [which it itsn't]) before I do anything else to get really trouble free working. I put this article up on my blog to explain that.

happy to chat about this (as I'll no doubt learn more too ;-)

ICC profiles

Thanks for your reply, I'm still learning to get my workflow better and better. I now use the negative-function in Silverfast so I can do settings as filmtype, brand and ISO. Using the sliders "exposure" and "tollerance" I beware the analogue data is covered by the dynamic range of my Coolscan. In the menu "histogram" I keep the range as wide as possible because of the high D-factor of my scanner and the 14-bit capture. I use the ICE-fine function that does a increddable job in scrath and dust-removement and also removes grain effectivally. I then get a 128 Mb TIFF that looks as a transparrancy; soft and glossy, but has all information in it. Imported in CS3 I'll do the post-processing using auto-levels, color-balance, contrast unsharp masking and the more sophisticated adjustments. This results in nice clear 2400*3600 JPEG's (4 - 8 Mb). So far I'm happy with it.

I'm not interested in batch scanning anymore because I found out that every scan needs a prescan and manual adjustments for a good base-TIFF.

What I want to learn is using ICC-profiles. As told I made my personal profile using Adobe-Gamma that's loaded with booting up my PC. In CS3 there are so many places where I can set profiles, I just don't understand it very well.

I sent a test-JPEG to several Lab's, using the possablillaty for correcting with yes and no, they all look different, exposure was OK but saturation was a bit to low. I can level the monitor-settings with the avarage prints, I suggest a better way is to do that with ICC-profiles. Who has helpfull information about that?