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Film to digital
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I wouldn’t tend to worry too much about image quality losses through your negatives. You pretty much lose something in any conversion process, but in the case of digitising film negatives, a dedicated negative scanner can pull an awful lot of information from your negatives, and probably more than you probably even think is there, especially if your only reference point are smaller prints/ prints from non-pro labs.
Your biggest issue with scanning colour negatives, will be getting the colour you like from them, as scanning the same colour negative through several different scanners will give you several different colour balances, so you will need to factor in a little post-processing time to get the colour you want from your scans consistently.
That’s brilliant. I really have to start getting onto this asap, as I’ve tons to do. It’s just my patience is lacking and everything I go to start it and see the amount I’ve built up over the year, my heart sinks.
Ha ha, good luck with the backlog, just remember a lot of your scanning time will be waiting for the negative to scan, so you can be doing other things at the computer too while you’re scanning, or maybe give yourself the goal of scanning a roll each day when you are at the computer.
Also, the best scanning process tends to be to avoid tweaking the scanning software for each scan, instead just setting it to 16 bit tiffs and setting the scanner to pull out the maximum information in the negative. You scans will be quite flat, but all the information will be there, and once you bring it into your post-processing program, you can crop, sharpen, pull in the black and white points with levels/ auto-levels, and then simply save your files. B&W negatives will be easier than colour in this regard, which will require the additional step of playing with the colour to get what you want, and often dabbling a little with the scanning software and picking a colour negative preset at the scanning stage may get you more consistent scans.
By the way, all scanning software either tends to be terrible to work with, so you may find it worthwhile to bite the bullet like many others and just buy Vuescan, and be done with it.
Have had a look VueScan. Looks quite interesting but can’t seem to get the full gist of it. I am assuming it’s an advanced scanning program that can be used with most scanners? It may be worth buying something like that.
Yes, one of two main programs in the field of scanning software, both of which are head and shoulders ahead of most manufacturers scanning software. The other one is Silverfast, and to be honest, both have terribly unintuitive user interfaces, as while the functionality is great, obviously no great thought has been given to making either as useable as it should be.
Basically, I plumped for Vuescan for a few reasons, namely so I would have to only learn one terrible piece of scanning software, divil you know and all that. Vuescan is constantly updated to work with most scanners, and will work with many scanners no other software will work with anymore, as well as being able to buy a lifelong license meaning you pay once for lifelong upgrades.
That’s great advice. Have you used it much yourself? As long as it’s not too difficult to use, sounds like the type of thing that might work for me. I’ve read a few reviews on it and seems to get fairly decent reviews except for, as you said, the interface. There seems to be a free version that I might try out first.
Yes, check it out and play around with it, as you will need to, to figure it out. Basically, once you can stretch the histogram out to ensure you are clipping no data at the scanning stage, and can output it to a 16 bit tiff, you can do the rest in your post processing software :)
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