santier

Santa was very good to me and as a result I have a brand new Epson

2200.

 

The question; does anyone know of or can give me a list of compatible

epson and third party papers compatible with the 2200?

'I guess my main question is, should all the adjustments--noise reduction, grain smoothing, color corrections, etc.--be done at the scanner level, or afterwards in Photoshop?'

 

Chip, I've read posts and sites that suggest the opposite, that adjustments (other than digital ice) should be done in photoshop. That's probably because most scanning software tools aren't as good as photoshop's. From what I gather, the idea is to keep the scan as close to the 'raw' negative and save that as your original then make the adjustments on a copy.

 

In my experience with my Coolscan 4000 I usually turn off all adjustments except for Ice and then scan it into photoshop. While that works fine with slide film, some 400 and 800 speed films look so grainy in the preview that I get the urge to turn on GEM or ROC to fix it pre-scan. But then it will look good in the preview and afterwards in photoshop looks bad (soft, off-color, etc). Like Hyun I'm always surprised at how grainy my scans are and I still haven't found a definitive way to reduce it.

 

Does anyone have suggestions on reducing grain in scans? Are there photoshop plugins available for that?

I've read some of the posts here on the whole CRT vs LCD monitor

debate and I certainly don't want to repeat that here. I've got a

small NYC apartment and a monstrous 21" CRT is just not an option.

 

I'm looking to find out of the models of LCD monitors that people are

using. Apple Cinema, etc.. If you're using a LCD, I'd love to hear

your experience and recommendations.

I do tech support for a living so believe me when I say I come up against this same issue a number of times.

 

Direct CD treats your CD-RW drive as if it were another harddrive. So what's wrong with that? A number of things. 1) The direct CD application sits in the background consuming a huge amount of your system resources; memory, processor, etc. Turn it off for a while and see how much faster your computer seems. Plus the write speed on any harddrive is much faster than a CD-RW especially since there's a software middle-man involved. 2) Its expensive. You could get a equivilent sized harddrive (650-700mg) on ebay for a few bucks at most. CD-R's run you a few pennies when you buy a spindle versus the average $2 for each CD-RW. 3)Portability. Some CD drives can't read CD-RW's. This could be an issue if you go to a Photo shop to print out your images. (Although, I'll admit this last problem is becoming increasingly rare.)

 

Here's what I did. I bought an extra IDE controller (@ $30) and two 1GB drives ($15 or so) on Ebay. I use one for my scratch disk in Photoshop and the other to store finished images. I scan files and work on them on my main drive (30GB). When I'm done I put the finished file on the 2nd 1GB drive. As it gets full I transfer everything on it to CD-R with the "close disk" option (This ensures I can read it on the majority of CD drives) and then wipe the harddrive clean. Quick with no muss and no fuss. In my humble opinion, CD-R's should be treated as a write-once media. I've seen nothing but trouble with the whole multi-session and re-writable stuff.

 

I just realized I've written a book here so let me summarize. I would never recommened saving a scan directly to a CD-RW and working on it from there. The probabilty of something going wrong and you losing all that work is really high. Scan your images to the harddisk and work on them there. As it fills up burn them to CD-R's and close the disk. I really can't stress that more. Though given my verbose ranting thus far, I bet I could. :)

Another suggestion may be to use PowerPoint's Pack and Go feature. It creates a stand alone projector similar to flash's. I use both Flash and Powerpoint and the latter requires a much less severe learning curve. Though image quality might be better in Flash. (I'm not sure)