Scan workflow

[dfoo]

Color scans from my coolscan 8 bit come out at 120M. 16 bit would obviously be bigger. In comparison, B&W film is around ~40M at 16 bit. The color ones are therefore truly quite massive... if I kept all of the images from all of my color film, I'd need to go out and get a few more TB of disk space. How do you guys manage your scans?

 

[Svitantti]

Hard disks are cheap these days... 500 GB is easily less than $100, probably more like 60-70 EUR.

(Shoot less, but with better percentage of succesful photos and scan just them?)

 

[maddoc]

You are saving as TIF-files ? I scan everything at 4800 dpi (135 film), color 24 bit and BW grey-scale 16 bit and save as JPG (highest quality level). This way I end up with files of ~ 17 MByte. Still enough quality for printing up to A3 size, IMHO.

 

[funkaoshi]

Why are you scanning every single frame from your colour film at the highest possible settings you can? I would scan everything at a lower DPI, and save as JPEGs. For stuff that you want to print, scan at the higher resolution and save as a TIFF. For most applications, JPEG files are going to do well enough.

 

[furcafe]

Ditto. Hard drives are cheap, especially so compared to film, processing, & time spent scanning. You can pick up a 2 TB external for about $200 in the U.S.

If you think those 35mm scans are big, just wait until you scan medium format.

Hard disks are cheap these days... 500 GB is easily less than $100, probably more like 60-70 EUR.

(Shoot less, but with better percentage of succesful photos and scan just them?)

 

[dfoo]

Why are you scanning every single frame from your colour film at the highest possible settings you can? I would scan everything at a lower DPI, and save as JPEGs. For stuff that you want to print, scan at the higher resolution and save as a TIFF. For most applications, JPEG files are going to do well enough.

The time to scan 2000 dpi vs 4000 dpi vs whatever is the basically the same, so I'd rather scan once than scan multiple times. I do throw out the garbage, but I'm still left with quite a few keepers.

 

[dfoo]

Ditto. Hard drives are cheap, especially so compared to film, processing, & time spent scanning. You can pick up a 2 TB external for about $200 in the U.S.

If you think those 35mm scans are big, just wait until you scan medium format.

Its true that hd's are cheap, but still its not as simple as you make it out to be! My machine currently already has 2 TB of storage, and I cannot add more internal drives. I'd have to replace the 2 500 MB drives with 2 TB drives if I wanted to increase that disk space. Then there is the backup issue; time machine wants a single volume, and so I'd need a RAID array to back up more stuff.

I do have quite a number of black and white medium format scans, which are 1G each. However, compared to 35mm film, I shoot relatively little medium format 🙂

 

[venchka]

I scanned 18 6x7 B&W negatives last night. 16 bit grayscale TIFF files at 2,400 DPI. The files are in the 65-70 MB range. They look AWESOME! They print just fine. 1 TB external drives are in the $100-$150 range depending on whether or not they have Firewire ports.

 

[dfoo]

Do you RAID your external TB drives?

 

[craygc]

For me, I do use external RAID. My working drives are in a Linux based NAS box with 4x 1TB drives - 2x are in a RAID 1 config and the other two are stand alones. I regularly alternate copying scanned images from the RAID drive to two internal drives. All files are maintained in folders of no more than 4.3GB which once full are copied to DVD. B&W 16-bits scans, as you say are 40MB, and I have about 140GBs of those. The bigger storage hog are my 6x7 4000dpi scans; even in B&W, they're 185MB each. That damn storage - even with terabit drives - disappears very quickly. The drives might be "cheap" but good external boxes are not.

BTW, 120MB scans in colour would be 16-bit 😀

 

[dfoo]

You are right... thats annoying, I select 24 RGB in vuescan. I wonder why the DNG files are 120MB?

And more to the point, how can I downsample them to 8bit without rescanning all those negatives again?!

 

[venchka]

I have questions:

I read that people "scan at 3,200 and downsize to 1,600" or 4,800/2,400, etc. Why? Waht are the benefits? How do you do it? Can we keep the discussion to Epson scanners for the time being? I own and use an Epson scanner. Giving me examples from Nikon, Canon, Minolta, etc. aren't relevant. OK, the conversion to half DPI would be relevant.

Why are you scanning 6x7, or larger, originals at 4,000 DPI? Are you printing billboards? Posters???????????

Help me understand.

EDIT TO ADD:

Downsample to 8 bit? Simple. Convert to JPEG. They look like crap. They are smaller.

 

[dfoo]

With my epson the quality is better if you scan at a high resolution and down-sample to a desired resolution than if you scanned at the desired resolution from the get go.

 

[venchka]

OK, suppose I buy that. Now, how do I convert from 4,800 to 2,400? As an example.

 

[funkaoshi]

People need to be wary about using RAID for back up. More often than not it's not worth the trouble of setting up. You are better of just mirroring a drive.

 

[dfoo]

Sorry, but to me mirroring to a drive is not a backup solution. What happens to your history? ie: what happens if you accidently delete a file, and then go to retrieve it after your last "backup"?

Time-machine is a great backup solution.

 

[dfoo]

OK, suppose I buy that. Now, how do I convert from 4,800 to 2,400? As an example.

I resize in photoshop using bicubic sharper.

 

[historicist]

I scan at 4000dpi if a picture is good, and 2000 if its average or was taken with grainy film, 16bit TIFF, basically because although I have never used a picture for anything other than a small jpeg on Flickr, scanning is so incredibly tedious I'd rather get it done once, just in case one day Vogue come knocking on my door wanting a double page spread.

And more to the point, how can I downsample them to 8bit without rescanning all those negatives again?!

I'm not sure if this works the same way with DNGs, but usually in photoshop go to Image >> Mode >> 8 Bits/Channel and then save as a TIFF, or jpeg if you want. If you edit the jpeg a lot you start to get compression artefacts because every time the file is saved it gets compressed again, but you save a lot of disk space.

 

[dfoo]

Yeah, I did did the mode 8-bit in photoshop, but I couldn't save it back out as a DNG. Instead the image was a PNG. Perhaps there is no real difference, however. Does anyone know?

 

[funkaoshi]

dfoo, I agree. With RAID however you have the extra problem of rebuilding RAID arrays and junk like that when one of your drives craps out.

Also, a single time machine backup isn't something I would trust.