ICE: Normal or Fine?

[edward_karaa1]

Hello.

 

Which setting works better for you? I use a Nikon 5000 scanner, and I found

that Normal does not remove all the blemishes, while Fine kills a lot of

detail. So I'm kind of lost here. Does sharpening bring back any of the lost

detail in Fine mode?

Thanks,

[jammer_jammer]

Edward,<br>

I agree that using Fine gets rid of too much detail. I only ever use Normal. I recently purchased a hand squeeze, air blower, called the Giotto, to dust my slides before scanning. With a combination of the Giotto and Normal Ice, I'm normally very hard pressed to find any spots at all. I scanning strictly Kodachromes thus far and on certain slides, even the Normal Ice doesn't play nice with the slide and I have to use no Ice at all but that's not very often. Following is an url for the air blower that I was talking about. Sorry, I don't know how to make it and active link. You'll have to copy and paste it into your browser. I hope this helps you. Good luck.<br>

http://photofilter.com/giottos_rocket_air_large_size.htm

[mendel_leisk]

FYI, the Minolta (RIP) scanners do not have normal/fine settings for ICE: there is only one setting. From your description, I would think it's akin to normal setting. There are usually some remnants of dust when ICE is used. Once in a while, I'll do a scan with ICE *off*, just to convince myself it *is* just a few stragglers I'm having to clean by hand.

 

There is a slight reduction in grain prominence with ICE activated with my Minolta Scan Elite 5400, but that's likely due to the manditory inclusion of the Grain Dissolver (frosted glass diffuser) in the light path, when ICE is on.

[graybrick]

I second the air blower recommendation, along with some lint-free white gloves. I have found that with my Epson 4490 the ICE feature tends to do more harm than good with scans. I tend to turn off the sharpening, too, as I would rather retain control via PS than surrender to the scanner software in my original scan output. Thorough use of the blower will remove the vast majority of the dust from your films pre-scan most of the time, and this will allow you to rely much, much less on software-driven processing and retain much more of your original quality in scanning, as well as cutting your post-processing clean-up time significantly. I have also heard (anecdotally) of the use of ionizers such as the ionic breeze in the area of the scanner to keep down dust and keep dust from adhering to the film, thus aiding in blower removal and cutting working time. As always, it's much much better to start with a quality product (scan) than to try to restore a poor product. Good luck.

 

GM

[edward_karaa1]

I do use an air blower before scanning, but it is by far not as efficient as the battery powered anti-static brush I used in my darkroom days. In fact, I suspect the air blower to just have the opposite effect.

[jammer_jammer]

Edward,

I'm not sure which air blower you are using but I know for sure that what I use works very well. Right after I bought it, I did some testing because I wasn't going to use this extra step if it were not effective. I would take a slide and scan it with no air blower and no ICE and then save the scan. Then I would take the slide back out of the scanner, use the Giotto Air Rocket, the largest one and then rescan, this time also without ICE. I then would look very closely at both scans. In almost every case, it would reduce the number of dust spots by approximately 70-80 percent.<p>

 

With slides that I do not use ICE on this has DRAMATICALLY cut down on my spotting time and as I said before, when I use ICE normal after using the air blower, it's very difficult to find and spots at all.

[jtk]

With Nikon V : Vuescan is more subtle than Nikonscan (provides a lower setting, though the middle setting may also be better).

 

Normal with Nikonscan nicely eliminates all (all) dust for me, to my 12X18 maximum, when I use it with color neg strips.

 

1) clean your film

 

2)consider Vuescan (however, Nikonscan's more convenient with C-41 because the motorized carrier reads framelines with Nikonscan, while with Vuescan you have to fiddle a bit to get framelines lined up, one by one, unless you use the strip film accessory.