Tinkering with scanned photos

[Pfreddee]

I'm sure this question has come up before, but I'm going to ask it anyway. If I have my film negatives scanned to a CD, is it possible to do a little Photo
Shop work on them?

Thank you to all who reply.

With best regards,

Pfreddee(Stephen)

 

[willie_901]

Yes, it is.

The flexibility for working with the scans depends on the quality and size of the scans.

I suggest you don't use the CDs as your primary method of storage.

 

[lynnb]

^^what Willie said - TIFFs will give you more flexibility to adjust curves without creating artefacts.

 

[DrTebi]

^^what Willie said - TIFFs will give you more flexibility to adjust curves without creating artefacts.

Yes, it's true, and it's what they all say. But honestly, if you don't need to do major curve adjustments, it's not a big deal if you get JPGs instead of TIFFs.

I just edited a bunch of high-res scans (from NCPS), often increased the shadows a bit, and was surprised how little artifacts I got. I think the "you have to have TIFF images to be able to post edit" is a bit exaggerated.

 

[Dwig]

Yes, it's true, and it's what they all say. But honestly, if you don't need to do major curve adjustments, it's not a big deal if you get JPGs instead of TIFFs. ...

8bit JPEGs and 8bit TIFFs aren't significantly different when it comes to tonal range and adjustment capability.

The big issue with JPEGs centers on the compression artifacts. All JPEGs will have some "flaws" created by the compression. If the compression is significant then the flaws can be rather severe and can become much more visible if you do much to alter the densities.

Also, since it is impossible to edit JPEG image data, you have to decompress it to do any edits. If you want a JPEG in the end (e.g. for web display, ...) you then have to recompress it which will compound the compression artifacts.

If you intend on doing quality work you should NEVER use JPEGs and an intermediary file format.

 

[Corran]

jpegs are perfectly acceptable to edit for most people printing an occasional snapshot.

If you are doing serious work you probably should own your own scanner. Alternatively, custom 16b tiff scans will be exorbitantly expensive.

 

[Scapevision]

As a rule of thumb, if you get a jpeg source, first thing to do is save it as tiff, then work on that. Never re-save jpegs.

 

[froyd]

As long as you don't expect too much, you can go right ahead. It won't take much to make the image fall apart if you start pushing shadows and highlights too far...

 

[Ronald M]

16 bit makes nice gradients

8 bit JPEG gets banding where gradients are used.