Coolscan 5000 advice need by newbee

[aaron_dohrn]

<p>Ok fairly large project here. Roughly 3,500 color negatives and 5,500 color slides to sort through. Obvioulsy going to do some paring down, but its still going to be big project. For that end bought a coolscan 5000 and sf-210 slide feeder. What I want to do is create a good archival version that probably won't get much access except to print. These files I expect to be big.<br>

Doing Color negatives for now<br>

Currently have scanner set to:<br>

4000dpi<br>

16 bit color<br>

Digtal ice4 on<br>

digal roc 0<br>

digital gem 4<br>

digital DEE 15<br>

Scan image enhancer on<br>

Saving files as Tiff's<br>

Found these setting in the forum as a good base to batch scan bulk negatives. Anyone have any other suggestions for gross settings for batching? I figure I will have to go back and play with some of the negatives, but I'am hoping that these setting will work for most. <br>

This is producing somewhere between a 130-135 meg files. I don't figure this is a huge deal as western digital 1 terebyte external drives are going for only $108 dollars these days. If my math is correct a 1TB drive could hold over 7000 of such pictures. We would have 4 identical such drives in the family for backup. Are hard drives in a drawer a better solution for longterm storage than cd's or dvd's?<br>

Accessing these files is a little slow on my AMD 3,200, 1 gig Ram system, but not crazily so. The scan times also don't seem to have significantly increased either from 600 dpi jpgs that are running around 3-4megs. So any reason not to record at highest levels for the archival version?<br>

So the next thing I want to do is have a jpg version (3-4) meg each of these files. This would be for viewing on the computer screen. Used in the my picture screen saver on windows as well as those frame/picture viewers. Is 3-4 megs a good size for this kind of application allowing for some fudge factor for future improvments? Simply reducing the size of the 130 meg tiffs down to 3-4 meg jpgs what kind of problems do you encounter and is it fesable? I have reduced smaller files before, but this seems like a big leap. If you can do it are there any programs that allow the batching of such jobs and what would your recomendations be.? Don't want to have to scan these immages twice, but if that is what is needed I can do it.<br>

I have owed this coolscan for less the 24 hours so any help would be appriciated. I'am currently playing with things and reading the manual.</p>

<p> </p>

[Ed_Ingold]

<p>Turn GEM and DEE off. They "improve" the image by degrading it. Consider the scan your digital "negative" and save the processing for later. The exception is Digital ICE. It has very little effect on sharpness, but saves you hours of de-dusting the images.</p>

[mendel_leisk]

<p>Try Vuescan. Take your time: don't plunge in. Experiment.</p>

[tibz]

<p>Unless you really need the enhancing, leave the enhancing off. Given the price of space these days the only limit to your size constraints are the transfer/scan speed. Scan at however big you need to print, and remember that you can rescan images if you want to print really large. You're going to be spending a lot of time scanning for 2000 files.</p>

[aaron_dohrn]

<p>Ok gem and dee as well as enhancing off. Just running my first tires with these features off. Thanks.</p>

[aaron_dohrn]

<p>Just a quick update and a bit of elaboration on what has been said already for anyone who finds this thread in the future. After reading around there are 2 type of processes. Those that affect the image as it is being scanned and those that alter the image after the image has been scanned. Dee, Gem, Color balance brightness and contrast ect, image enhancer and curves are all post scan. These process and be easily done in any photo editing program like photoshop. If applied to your image as part of the scanning process they are done and can not be reversed. When your doing large numbers of images don't mess with them. So for good quality slides or negatives just use digital ice, single pass (1x normal), 16 bit scan depth, whatever resolution you desire 3,200 dpi minimum to print 8 by 10s and save as a tiff. <br>

However when you are scanning undereposed immages use analog gain as well. Analog gain affects the image as it is being scanned. It has the effect like in a wet lab of just increasing the exposure time. It can't work miracles but works great for 1 to 2 stop underexposed negatives. Run previews and try different settings to determine what works best on each slide. My underexposures vary to much to batch this process. The immage can be slighty immproved by multisampling. If it is important enough try 16x.<br>

There appears to be a large number off applications that can batch reduce and change the format (ex tiff to Jpg). Some freeware and some costing 20-40 dollars. Supposedly photoshop can do it two. Just beginning to experiment with them.</p>