Best Way to Resize: Coolscan Crop Tools or Photoshop?

[dglickstein]

What's better for final output: specifying the output size at time

of scanning a slide (I use a Nikon 5000 -- crop tool) or resizing an

image through Photoshop CS.

 

Is the scanner doing any thing optically that is different than

Photoshop resize algorithm?

 

And if it's best to resize in Photoshop, then what size should I

scan to, the actual size of the slide?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

dG

[beauh44]

Hi Derek, There may be some who'll say scan for output size because the image is neither interpolated up or down. But scanning is such a time-consuming PITA that this approach isn't very practical. I can't imagine rescanning someting over and over when I wanted to change print sizes or post on the web. So it makes sense (to me anyway) to simply scan at the highest optical resolution that your scanner is capable of so that you'll likely be down sampling as opposed to up sampling. Most would agree that it's preferable to make a large image smaller rather than a small image larger. Best wishes . . .

[ac_gordon]

As for the question posed in your heading, I found the crop tools in my Nikon scanner software (I have a old Coolscan IV) much less precise than PS. (It may be different with the 5000.) Thus, I always scan the entire slide/neg and crop the image in PS.<p> Also, as Beau suggested you do, I always scan at the highest resolution possible and the greatest bit depth. I don't want to have to touch my original slides/negs more than necessary.<p>Further, when you scan at 4000 dpi, the image created can be easily resized without any "algorithms" being applied by any software. Your 4000 dpi scan printed at 4000 dpi will be the same size as your neg/slide. If you choose to "resize" it to 300 dpi, the same pixels are simply spread out. The image prints larger at 300 dpi than 4000 dpi without any program having to create any new pixels. If, however, you need to uprez your image to print it at size and dpi not permitted by your original scan, then you should use PS's uprezzing algorithms (like bicubic, bicubic sharper, bicubic smoother, etc.) to create the new image pixels.