The Scanner

Friday, November 25, 2011

The Scanner

     I can't remember the impetus for me to write about this topic today, but it will grab your attention. I wrote an instalment way back about copying slides. I started with the scanner, and then figured out a way to copy them with my camera. That was faster and gave a good-enough quality for my clients. I proved them with 4" x 6" @ 300 dpi and  a lager size for making 10" x 12" @ 300 dpi. "DPI" stands for dots per inch. That size is good enough for making prints, as the human eye cannot resolve anything finer.

     I decided for this instalment to write about scanning a negative. By the time I finished selecting my photos for this instalment, it made me realize what the digital era has done to photography. My analogy would be similar to the car and horse, or the airplane and travel. It certainly was a giant step!

   So without further "chatter", here we go.

   The negatives below are  some of the remaining film that I was able to salvage after a "flood of the century" ruined my basement,  Hasselbad equipment, a few canon cameras, and about 5000 slides and negatives!

  The moral of that story is: Always keep your film or digital material in a secure and dry place if ever.....

  I purchased a Nikon 8000 film scanner a few years ago to transfer all of my slides (that I still had) to digital media. After a couple of hours, I realized that that to do what I wanted to do would take months and months of 20 hour weeks. I decided to sell the scanner, and I left the slides in their trays. By the way, the Nikon 8000 is 1 generation prior to the release of the Nikon 9000. Save yourself thousands, and if you ever get your hands on a Nikon 8000 dedicated film scanner, go for it. There is the Imacon scanner, but they're "sparse" on E-Bay and on a good day with run you about $ 3500.00- $4500.00 U.S.

     When the Epson V700 and V750 came out, I read the reviews and decided to buy one on E-Bay. It's great, but I would save it for super-quality work if someone needed a 16" x 20" (40 cm x 50 cm) @ 300 dpi. or larger print to be made from a 35mm negative. For "average" work, simply refer to my instalment on using your camera to copy slides or negatives.

The Epson V700 comes with all sizes of film holders.

The above is for 2 1/4" x 2 1/4" ( 6cm x 6cm ).

The Epson Software is adequate, since you can work in Photoshop.

Above are 2 windows/menus for adjusting some of the characteristics of the film scan.

I have a problem of not being able to get the plug-in of Epson scanning into Photoshop.

If anyone reads this, please drop me a line. For now, I just scan with Epson, save the file to my desktop, and then open the image in Photoshop.

If you are into serious scanning, the Silverfast is "the software" to buy.

This is the scan result.

The "eyedropper" is used to adjust the colour, density and contrast (please see below).

With a software like Silverfast, you'll be given a list of default film choices to zero on on a very 

good-excellent result. Epson, simple has the options of scanning negative, slide (positive) or reflective (page or photo).

Some adjustments that I made are shown above.

Here is the result which is a better-working start in Photoshop

Here's the data of the scan.

It's certainly more than adequate to work with.

The file saved to my desktop, for later work in Photoshop.

I saved the scan to my desktop.

Photoshop

Step 1: Adjust the intensity of the sky.

I purposely  did a "poor" selection to better show you the results.

I adjusted the sky, then I did an "inverse selection" to adjust the ground.

Step 2: Automatic Color in Photoshop

Step 3:

Bring out better detail in the lower portions of the image.

This is how the image looked before the above corrections.

Lots of repair work to do from what I considered a salvageable  negative from that 1986 flood.

Selecting the sky for improvement

Inverting the selection to work on the "bottom portion".

Step 4

IMprovement on the lower portion of the image.

The Improvement

A portion of the image.

I forgot to place the emulsion of the negative towards the Epson's negative scanner reader.

On these desktop scanners, you have a dual feature for scanning:

1. Film

2. Reflective material such as a photograph, magazine cutout, etc...

Step 5:

Flip the image (Horizontal flip command in Photoshop)

Step 6: 

Resize the image and save it with another title such as "smaller Vermont Town Scene"

Step 7:

This is the horse era moving into the car era.

Clean up the town to look like it did before electricity!

Remove the cars, the wires, the electrical pole the lawn stakes, etc....

This is done with what Photoshop calls "content aware"

You delete a selection (Shift Delete) and then bring up 

"content aware". What content aware "tries" to do is remove the "strange item in the photo (the wires) and replae it with surrounding material.

This doesn't always work, so it's better to start with smaller selections than larger ones. 

That works better! I'm sure Photoshop Cs7 or 8 will improve that!

The content-aware window

Better to work with small parts of the scene than larger parts. 

the reason is that Photoshop tries to select surrounding areas to blend in with what you want to remove.

I wanted to remove those grren stakes in the ground

This is what Photoshop's content aware wanted to give me!

Step 8:

I removed the car the old-fashioned way, with the rubber stamp.

The car was removed, along with the telephone and wire pole.

A before and after close-cropped comparison.

What would we do without the DE (digital era)?

The Philosophical "Stuff"

It's easy for most of the younger generation (I'm young at heart!) to have slipped into the Digital Era quite easily, and take for granted what us older people (I'll be 63 on Tuesday, November 29th) have seen change. Having taught pro photography, I naturally had to adapt. For some people the change sure must be shocking. There was a small article in the news the other day. A 2 year old baby was trying to move images in a glossy-paged book sideways - she thought it was an I-Phone! She got extremely agitated and upset, not understanding what a book was or having been confused!

Times certainly have changed!