Abandonment
I have been fooling around with things in Photoshop today. Some good things came out of it, like the Maine pictures being uploaded. But, I also was trying to work with some of the images I had scanned while at the gallery over the weekend. These were mostly 35mm slides and negatives, scanned at the maximum hardware resolution of the film scanner — 4000dpi. I was very, very disappointed with the results.
It’s not the dirt and crap that’s embedded in the damned things that has me bothered. It’s that they’re just not as crisp and sharp as I’ve become accustomed to. My digital images are, as long as I’ve not pushed the ISO too far or used too slow a shutter speed, exceptionally crisp. The focus is sharp. The detail is amazing.
By comparison, the film images, frankly, suck.
So, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just plain not going to get a good scan out of the old film images. With that said, they’re all going back into a box to be abandoned on a shelf some place, never to be seen again. I’m not real happy about it, as there were some pictures there that will never be again, lost forever to the ravages of time attacking a less than stable medium.
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i’m glad you’re putting them in a box instead of trashing them. as you said, they can’t be redone now because the scenes/objects are gone forever, in which case a lower-quality picture is better than none at all. for example, if my mom had trashed the 1890’s portraits found in my grandmother’s house just because they’d been damaged and no one else wanted to keep them, they’d be gone forever. as it is, she’s been figuring out who the people are, in spite of the damage. anything is better than nothing when dealing with images that are irreplaceable.
Would you be opposed to bringing a few this way? I generally get good results pulling scans from 35mm film with the Minolta.
We can sure give them a try. I’ll try to cull out some of the less crappy ones, and bring them on Sunday (I doubt I’ll get them picked out in time to bring tomorrow morning).
The scanner I’ve been trying to work with is a Microtex ArtixScan 120tf, with the latest firmware and software. I’d be thrilled if you can get a better result than I’ve been getting with that — though it ought to be able to make a gorgeous scan.
I’ve heard mixed opinions with regards to Microtek scanners. The 120tf also doesn’t have any hardware dust/scratch removal (pre-ICE?). Also keep in mind that when scanning, you always need to apply a base level of unsharp masking to restore edge contrast.
All the prints I had at Borders’ and the ones I had with me at the last meeting came off of (I believe) 2700dpi scans from the Minolta. If it wasn’t that, then I probably scanned at 5400dpi and downsampled to whatever was necessary to print the 11×14″ crop at MPix’s native resolution. The Epson V700 will get nice 3200dpi scans from medium-format, and I’ve printed those nicely.
[...] Last week, last year, I grumbled that I was going to ditch all my old film images because 1) some were in bad shape and (2) I couldn’t get a good scan to save my life. Rob commented that he’d give some of them a whack, to see if he couldn’t get a decent image out of them. [...]