New to the process

[MIkhail]

Hello,
I am a new rangefinder owner, but not really new to photography, have been shooting all my life pretty much, starting with Russian Zenit camera, then Canon Elan 2, then several digital cameras, the last one of them Canon 10D still owe and shoot.
But since I really got involved in street photography and such, I got myself little rangefinder Canonet QL17 and I am considering either Bessa or Contas G2 now.
I am still trying to understand the workflow process. I have been just shooting Canonet and developing and printing my photos straight which is fine I guess. But my experience with Digital cameras tought me to love Photoshop and digital manipulations, like converting to b/w and toning and increasing the contrast and such. For me to do all this with my images now I need a film scanner, and I am planning on getting one soon.
Anyway, here comes a question- sorry for the long story.
IF I scan the film, it supposedly creates huge files, mach larger than of those from my Canon DSLR. I dont have home printer and not plan on getting one- dont like any results that I have ever seen from them. WIth my digital files I always sent it to lab thru the net and got prints back by mail. BUT those files were 3-6 meg, not 30-90 meg that you get from scanner? SO HOW DO YOU HANDLE HUGE IMAGES if you still want the flexability of Photoshop corrections but good quality prints?
THANKS A LOT FOR YOUR ADVICES.
Mikhail

 

[JoeFriday]

welcome to the group, Mikhail

I have a Nikon Coolscan V that I use to scan all my negs and slides.. a typical scan (at 4000 dpi) is about 55 megs, but my computer (1ghz G4 Powerbook with 1gb ram) handles them just fine.. but I've never emailed a file that large.. you can save them to jpg compressed format, but I personally feel the quality suffers.. whenever I get around to actually printing some of my photos (which will happen after I start taking photos worth printing, of course) I'll burn them to cd and mail the cd to the lab

 

[MIkhail]

Thank you.
Can you recomment any decent place in US to have service like that?
Not overly expencive but with decent quality prints.
THanks.

 

[dmr]

If I scan a neg or slide at max res, 16 bit, tiff or .psd file, it comes out to 80-some megabytes, yes.

If I'm not planning a huge print, then if I scan it at 8 bit, lower res, .jpg file and it comes out just fine at 3 megs or so.

If for the web only, scan at 1200dpi, 8 bit, then size it down to 12" on the long side and it comes out to a couple hundred kb, depending on the .jpg quality you specify.

For those I want to make a nice print of, I'm getting in the habit of making a humongous scan at max res, then doing the touch-up on that one, then sizing it down to something like 8x10, 300dpi, 8bit to print.

I'm still experimenting with the best way to store and save and such.

 

[MIkhail]

Doesn't it somehow defeats the purpose of scanning huge file at high resolution?

 

[GeneW]

It's a good question -- there are so many variables and preferences. I've been tinkering with my scanning workflow for 3-4 yrs and it currently looks like this:

0. Name the images while scanning: I use a date/sequence format: e.g. 200510-b5-01+ meaning 2005, October, 5th roll of B&W for the month, frames 1-36. For images I work up in Photoshop, I add a descriptor at the end of the filename, e.g., frame 24 might be saved as 200510-b5-24--harbour-port-credit.jpg. I use VueScan and it will sequence the frames automatically when I'm scanning once I enter the base name. I like the image name to correspond to the frame number of the roll.

1. Scan every frame to 16-bit TIFF, but not at max res. I use 2700 for 35mm and 1200 for 120.

2. Work up any images that catch my eye for web presentation and/or small prints, saving each as 8-bit JPG.

3. Using Photoshop's Contact Sheet II feature, create an 8x10 @ 200 dpi contact sheet of each roll. Add camera, developer and development time to the contact image via the Info function. Save as 8-bit JPG. Contact sheet name corresponds to the image names: e.g., 200510-b5--contact-sheet.jpg

4. To keep disk usage sane, delete all the scanned TIFFs, using the contact sheet for future reference. For images I want to do up proud, I rescan later at max res. There are only a few of these, and I keep them stored in layers in PSD format.

The date/sequence filenaming works really well for me. Everything on the computer is automatically sorted by date, and I can locate individual JPG's that I've edited in Photoshop by searching on my descriptors.

Gene

 

[jaapv]

I do scan to 5400 DPI 16-bits Tiff, for prints that really matter. This results in 120-140 MB files.Working them in PS requires a lot of RAM, as it seems to be rather careless with memory. Not all PS actions accept 16 bits, though. After I have finished I compress them to max quality Jpeg's resulting in about 12 MB files. These I upload to Kodak Germany, that returns superb chemical prints. Kodak accepts 8-bits Jpeg only, so I have no choice in the matter. But I do upload maybe 30 files at a time, being 350 MB and that is no problem using DSL. Not too important frames I scan to 2700 Dpi, like Gene. I find it hard to distinguish the prints from the 5400 DPI scans...