Resolution for Scanning Negs?

[JeremyLangford]

I am very, very confused on what resolution, size, and bit I should scan my 35mm color negs at. I just got a brand new Epson V500 film scanner and I have a ton of negs that I need to scan for internet use.

I am scanning my negs so that I can post them on a website. I am not going to ever print these pictures, so I don't need to scan at a higher size so that I can print them one day. I will need to have all my final pictures at 550px on the long side (this will be the size that they are shown at on my website), and 72dpi (I think this is what resolution moniters read pictures at).

I was thinking, that maybe I should just scan all me negs at 550px, and 72dpi, but I am afraid that I will not get a good quality and/or sharpness. I am also worried that I will need a bigger resolution so that I can not lose any quality when I perform post processing such as white balance, saturation, exposure that I do to almost every picture.

I just want to achieve a scan that takes advantage of the sharpness and quality of my negs, but want the smallest possible file size, because they will all be on a website.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.
,thanx

 

[Ducky]

My canoscan defaults to 300 dpi for color negs. Maybe you should start with the epson defaults.

 

[aad]

Don't get confused between input and output resolution. And forget 72 DPI.

For 35mm, a scanning resolution of 800 pixels per inch (also known as DPI,but that will get mixed up with print resolution) will give a decent sized picture on the average screen. 1200 is overkill and will spill off the edge of most displays.

Try a few scans and post them where they'll be viewed the way you want-here or Flickr would work.

And don't fall into the TIFF trap. 8 bit, medium JPEG is what you want, otherwise you'll fill your hard drive and spend the rest of your life scanning.

 

[OldNick]

Maybe I work too hard at the task, but I scan at the maximum resolution of the scanner, do my post-processing in PS Elements 5, then use PS-5 to resize the image to the size and resolution I need for posting on the net. Since I scan many images that are not posted, I save the full-size file on my hard drive, and rename the smaller image that I post on the web.

Jim N.

 

[bmattock]

Like OldNick, I scan at max resolution for 35mm - which is 3200 dpi on my Scan Dual IV, and 4800 on my Epson 4490.

Now, for 120 roll film, I have learned that a max scan of 6x9 @ 4800 is not only overkill, it makes my 2 gig RAM PC roll over and play dead. So for that, I back it off to like 1200 dpi.

But otherwise, I scan at max and reduce size in The GIMP, applying USM in stages.

 

[jslabovitz]

Your scanner has a native resolution of 6400 dpi. Scanning at even fractions of the native resolution generally works better than odd fractions. You didn't mention your film type, but if I was scanning medium-format film, I'd scan at 400, in 16-bit mode. If you're using 35mm, you might scan at 800 dpi.

The bit depth of each pixel will affect quality of those types of adjustments. Definitely try to scan at 16 bit resolution. This will give Photoshop much more latitude in its mathematical transformations.

Generally, changes in white balance, saturation, and exposure affect an image pixel-by-pixel, so are not dependent on resolution. You can imagine these adjustments as arithmetic applied to each pixel, one at a time.

After you do your adjustments in Photoshop, resize to 550px, and then apply an unsharp mask. Make sure you're looking at the image at 100% view when you do this! Adjust the mask's parameters so that sharpening is useful but not obvious. (One rule of thumb is to use 100% sharpening, with a radius of 1/10 the dpi.) Convert the image from 16-bit to 8-bit. Finally, save as a high-quality (8 on the 1-10 slider) JPEG.

Try this workflow out and see how it fits. Adjust if necessary!

 

[pizzahut88]

If you are scanning for the web.
DPI means nothing.

An image of same pixel size with 1dpi and 300dpi will have the same size on your web browser.


DPI is for printing.


Most modern film lab is capable of printing 300-400dpi.



If you are scanning 135 for printing at the foto lab.
Do your scans at 3,200 - 4,200 dpi.
That should be adequate for prints up to A3.

Canoscan do not glean more info by scanning at 6,400dpi.
It's a waste of time.
Nikon scan is sucking the maximum out of a frame at 4,200.

Your film grains, RF lens quality and soup quality will be your limiting factor.
Get the max means you will have to master every step of the workflow.



And like others above have said:
(i) Don't scan to tiff nor BMP, jpg would be fine.
(ii) Don't do 16bit, nor Adobe RBG, if you are only publishing to web.
(iii) Unless there is a shot that you plan on printing it big, larger than A3, AND
the place you are printing at is professional, meaning they apply the correct color profile to their printers, using good ink . . . color matching so forth.
Gamma correctly adjusted. . . .

THEN and only then do you do Adobe RBG, and 16bit tif.

The wider gamult and better colors won't show unless your printer guy is doing it right.






There is a different.

 

[xvvvz]

Invest the time to work through the tutorials at www.scantips.com or you are going to spinning your wheels forever. 😉

Doug

 

[Hates_]

I tend to scan at 2400dpi to try and get as much detail as possible and to give me more to work with, then I scale it down for the web at the end.

 

[dmr]

I've found that for a presentation quality print, the greater the resolution the better, and the greater the color depth the better. You want to resolve the film grain, but you don't want to exaggerate it with "aliasing" at a lower resolution.

What I've been doing lately is to scan at max resolution, 16 bit, which does make a HUGE file, 70 megabytes or so, and then keep the original scans intact in case I want to go back for some reason. When the drive starts to get crowded, I'll move these off to CD ROM.

You can always scale down, but not up!

I've made some stunning B+ (13x19") prints from 35mm scans.

 

[nightfly]

I scan at 16bit 4800 dpi into through the Epson Twain driver directly into Photoshop and save as a PSD. This is my negative. I then add adjustment layers to the PSD and save and then save a flattened, 8 bit tif for printing and a 800 pixel wide jpeg for web. If I ever want to make a print, the TIF is ready to go. If I want to re-adjust, I go back to the PSD. I sometimes print large 13 x 19 and I never want to have to re-scan or up res. It takes a lot of space and my current computer lags on saving and manipulations.

Going forward I might try moving to something like Lightroom and saving it in their format and then just producing the print and web versions as needed to save space. But hard drive space is cheap and I hate scanning so I want to do it once and never again.

I would say figure out what your end use is likely to be and work backwards. I decided I want the ability to print anything big. If I only wanted a web version, I'd work differently.

 

[Scarpia]

Don't get confused between input and output resolution. And forget 72 DPI.

And don't fall into the TIFF trap. 8 bit, medium JPEG is what you want, otherwise you'll fill your hard drive and spend the rest of your life scanning.

Jeremy is only 16. He'd probably finish scanning by the time he is 45.😀
Kurt M.

 

[Spyderman]

It seems the replies are starting to diverge from the original question, so I'll try to reply to the first post by Jeremy.

If you don't ever want to print from the digital files, and want them only for your webpage.

- scan at maximum resolution

- for maximum input for PS scan at maximum bit depth

- if you're not so critical even scanning color at 8bit per channel (24bit overall) will do, but I'd strongly recommend scanning B&W at 16bit depth (with B&W you might want to do some curves adjustments, in which case 16bit depth will give you enough information to start with)

- resize to smaller resolution, but try downsize each side by 1/2 or 1/4 or 1/8 at a time (e.g. 4000x2500 input image -> 2000x1250 or 1000x625 etc) for preserving sharpness

- as the last step resize to 550px width and sharpen (as others before me suggested)

- keep files at least 1000px wide just in case you'd like to change your webpage layout and display larger pictures (I'd recommend at least 2MPx ~ 1800x1200)

 

[haagen_dazs]

may i know how much did you buy your V500 for?
where did you buy it from ?
thanks

 

[Ronald M]

300 ppi is more than sufficient for web use and there is a cushion for processing.

My pic seem to look best at 96 ppi in the web.

get the color right and save it at the top of the dialog box where it says current setting, replace it with Fuji xxx and save that color bal. You can recall it later from the drop down menue.

Save it as tiff and finish as JPEG. Then delete the Tiff to save space or put it on a cd.

Your last step will be to reduce to 96 ppi and resize and then do the final sharpen at final size.

 

[robertdfeinman]

Read what he asked!

Read what he asked!

You want to scan so that the file has a dimension of at most 600 pixels in the long dimension. If you do more than this it will appear too big on most displays.

Your scanner software should give you a readout of the image dimensions for a given scanner resolution. For 35mm film 400 dpi X 1.5 inches would give you 600 pixels.

If you use the Epson software there is probably a preset that says something like scan for the web and will do the sizing for you. The only time you might want to scan at a higher setting is if you plan to crop the image, but you can probably do this using the scanner software as well.

Forget about 16 bit scanning as well, the web is only 8 bit and if you allow the scanner software to adjust the color balance and contrast you won't have to use an image editing package. This will save you a lot of time, if you have many images to scan.

Fussy photographers get caught up in process and forget to consider the ultimate target. Ignore their over enthusiasm. Since scanning and viewing in a browser will cost you nothing except a bit of time, I suggest trying a few settings and see for yourself.

I'd also second the idea of reading the scantips web site. I have a bunch of scanning tips on my site as well, but I think most are too advanced for what you want to do. But you are free to read and try any you like.

 

[JeremyLangford]

may i know how much did you buy your V500 for?
where did you buy it from ?
thanks

I bought my Epson V500 from bestbuy and it cost right at $290

 

[POGYBEAR]

may i know how much did you buy your V500 for?
where did you buy it from ?
thanks

I purchased my V500 for 200.00 with a $50 rebate. totao cost $150 plus s/h from Tiger Direct.com. I don't know if Epson still is running the rebate. Love my V500

 

[pevelg]

Wow, there sure are a lot of different opinions!!! As I plan to print some of my photos, I am going with a 300 dpi printing resolution, which means I need a 2540 ppi scanning resolution for my slides, according to the scanningtips website calculator. This gives me an image the size of 3671x2505. This is good for my purpose, and I can always scan again later if I want to make larger prints. If using JPEG excellent quality, a picture is turning out to be around ~9 mb. Fine with me.

Info:

1. Slides are Velvia 100 and scanner is Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED.

2. After scanning, the slides are never as sharp as when displayed with my Ektapro. Also, the colors are off.

Current Settings:

- I have disabled all enhancments other that Digital ICE, set to normal, and Digital GEM, set to max, 4.

What should be my solution?

- I am using the Nikon Scan software. Should I enable some settings like USM and curves? Or should I do all this in photoshop? Should I use Multiscanning? If so, 2x or 4x (I won't do 8 or 16 😀) Is Digital Gem worth it, or should I use USM in photoshop? Should I use TIFF if I am going to be editing my files in PS?

What I really want to do is to streamline my scanning, without buying Silverfast or Vuescan. I put in slides manualy as I do not have the 50 slide feeder. So, before I scan hundreds of photos, I'd like to know this:

What should be my most basic settings in Nikon Scan to promote the highest quality, considering that I can fix imperfections in PS?

-note: I will not be increasing the ppi unless absolutely necessary as I do not want files too large (larger than 30mb).

 

[Hates_]

All scans will need some form of USM applied to make them look sharp. USM should be the last thing you apply after re-sizing your photos, so I would do this afterwords in PS rather then at scan time.