Maybe Not So Bad
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.
Last night, we were over at Rob & Theresa’s place for a CMPG-related meeting, and afterward, Rob and I headed to his workroom to take a peek at some of the film. Yes, the film is in crappy shape. Some of the problems with the film may be able to be cured with a good re-washing, which I already knew.
The scanning is another issue altogether. Rob showed me images from a couple that he had played with, scanned at ‘only’ 2700 dpi. They looked just fine. So, we scanned a couple others. With the exception of the crap on the film, they, too, looked okay. So, what’s the difference? Had I done something really stupidly wrong?
No, not really. While Rob was using a different scanner, he indicated that may not have been the problem, either. Rather, the likelyhood is that the TWAIN scanner driver and capture software provided by the manufacturer is to blame. He indicated that the scans from his scanner’s included software would also have been soft. So, the big deal is getting good scanning software, and learning how to use it. Fortunately, good scanner software doesn’t have to be horrendously expensive.
Rob advocates the use of a piece of software called VueScan. Instead of using the Windows/TWAIN drivers for the scanner, VueScan uses its own drivers to directly read/manipulate the scanner hardware. The result is almost like RAW images from your scanner. I’m going to download and try the demo version tonight, and see how it works with my little Epson scanner. If the result is even halfway decent, spending the $50 on the standard version will pretty much be a no-brainer, especially since, once installed on my laptop, I’ll be able to use it with my Epson scanner, the Microtek scanner at the gallery, and even the little cheap film scanner I gave my Dad!
[...] On the matter of the scanned film, I tried the VueScan software mentioned yesterday with my Epson 2450 scanner. So far, I’m not noticing a tremendous difference between use VueScan and the supplied scanning interface. However, that may have something to do with the settings I applied and the slide I selected as my first attempt. I’ll try a couple more later on. If worst comes to worst, I’ll just have to spend some time at Rob’s scanning. [...]