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Old 28-06-2018, 12:12 PM
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sil (Steve)
Not even a speck of dust

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Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Canberra
Posts: 1,474
Plustek Opticfilm is what I went with. Fantastic results, dry scanner, not wet (which gets best results possible). Essential grab VueScan software, it IS the best scanning software, easy to use and works with every scanner. Also grab a IT8 scanner targets to suit the formats you intend to scan.

Digital ICE (IR channel) features are ok but can add smearing artifacts I've found, healing brush in photoshop is much better but I am trying to scan for archival rather than Facebook so putting in the time and effort to get a good scan is fine by me. Depend on what you want. Also I'd grab a bottle of film/negative cleaner too, it'll help get rid of dust and some mould on old film strips. If the film is old and valuable to you I'd also consider buying new sleeves to rehouse them in too, the old sleeves will have grit, mould spores and bacteria from years of storage. May as well rehouse in newer clean archival quality sleeves for storage after scanning. High dpi if fine but often the grain size in the negatives is the limiting factor.

Scan using vuescan with your calibration settings applied and NO balancing settings or auto adjustments (turn them all off! you ruin the point of a calibrated scan). adjust later in photoshop. You may want to experiment with any print scans the descreen settings which can do a good job of removing regular dots in the texture of some photo prints but the negs or slides should be good. I also transfer the metadata that I can to the raw scan sets I make, so one negative strip or strips from the one roll I store in one folder along with any information that was in the edges of the negative or written with them. Since this information is constant to the roll usually I note it in a text file with the raw scans so when I later process out jpegs I know I can use the same process or make an action to do them all. Also helps with other rolls of the same film. I record my raw scans as I call them though they are usually 48bit TIFF files, these are raw because they are the unprocessed scans, no cropping, no adjustments, nothing but the initial scan image at the highest resolution suitable to the source (take a few test scans first at the different dpi and look close to see where higher dpi becomes bigger blurs instead of finer details). I will use multipass scanning too at times (again test by scanning a small region of one photo containing good details).
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