scott_brim

<p>Patrick, which matte film do you use on your MacBook Pro's glossy screen? The reason I ask is that the Dell M4400 has a glossy wide-gamut screen and conceivably would be a less expensive alternative to the M6400. All the better if the matte film fixes the usual issues with glossy LCDs.</p>

<p>I have been giving serious thought to the Dell M6400. It is available with a matte version of the wide gamut LCD. About 70% of the time, it would be used in the office for driving a color calibrated graphics monitor such as one of the NECs. But the remaining 30% would be for road trips where the availability of a color-calibrated LCD in a laptop would be highly desirable. Another decision is which OS, and if it should be 32 bit or 64 bit. I remain partial to Windows XP. My primary data storage is either a server on my office network or else high capacity external drives if I'm on the road. The M6400 is expensive, but on the other hand, I haven't seen anything else that combines adequate graphics capability with a wide gamut matte LCD. </p>

"I use my local Costco's custom profile for their Noritsu 3411 available for download at Dry Creek and follow the instructions. Works fine."

 

That's what I do too. I have a color-managed workflow based on the Noritsu profile, and every print is always on target. Not only that, the local Costco staff actually understands what it is I'm doing and why!

Several months ago, I received my first proof copy of a print-on-demand 11x13, hardcover 120 page color photo book from Blurb, including a dust jacket. The price was $75.

 

The images were sharp, with excellent saturation, and the color values were very consistent with what my color-managed workflow said should be produced.

 

The only adjustments I made were to move some page content left or right to account for binding gutter, and to adjust the density of some images very slightly.

 

Later copies of the book have been absolutely consistent from batch to batch.

 

I doubt than any but the most expensive and most experienced color lithographers could do as well as the Blurb print-on-demand process did in producing this large format book.

 

The benefit of this approach is that I have complete end-to-end control over the quality of the product, both editorially and technically.

Wal-mart will print your negs to a CD if you order at least one set of prints. An extra charge goes with that, of course, but you would have proofs of the negs from which to choose the photos of interest.

 

That being said, if you are considering a scanner for 35mm for the purpose of getting the highest quality for the best of your images, the Nikon 5000 has done an excellent job scanning my color negatives.

One of the most important lessons I learned four years ago after purchasing my 5000 ED is that although the lens has good depth of field, you cannot get optimum sharpness unless you spend the time needed to map the curvature of the film using the techniques Jim describes.

 

I am about to self-publish an 11 x 13 color photo book through www.Blurb.com using scans made with the Nikon for most of the material.

 

I could not afford an Imacon for the scanning step, and so had to substitute lots of digital elbow grease using the Nikon in combination with Photoshop.

 

Anyway, I could not be more pleased with the final results. Blurb does a great job with their large format books, and the Nikon did much more than could or should be asked of a desktop scanner.

I second what J. Harrington says. In addition, I'll note that the flare is caused by the window that covers the scanner's CCD. It is not made of optical grade glass.

 

If someone asked what one single improvement I would make to the Nikon scanners---if there could only be one---I would say to replace the current CCD with one that does not need a protective window or which uses a window with optical grade glass.

 

You appear to be following the same route I did when I first got my Nikon scanner, playing with all the settings in a more or less adhoc fashion. Eventually, I learned that use of DEE seriously aggravates the flaring problem on contrasty slides.

 

When I'm using the Nikon software, as opposed to Silverfast, I generally don't use DEE, ROC, GEM and multi-sampling. I use ICE as needed and balance its use against the loss of sharpness on a case-by-case basis. I traverse the slide with the manual focus feature to decide where the optimum focus point is.

 

On difficult slides, I experiment with SIE and sometimes with Analog Gain to balance noise against flare and loss/gain of shadow and highlight detail. The rest I do in Photoshop. If I have to, I will do two scans at different exposures and then merge the two in Photoshop.

 

And if worst comes to worst, and the image is very important to digitize but just too difficult to deal with using a "cheap" desktop scanner, then the slide is sent off for a drum scan.

Most of my scanning using my CS 5000 is done against legacy Kodachrome II and Kodachrome 25. Mostly I get good results if I work at it.

 

But I do shoot some Elitechrome 100 once in awhile as a backup to my digital camera, and I find that you have to go back to basics if you want good results with a film camera. If you want a sharp photo and colors that aren't muddy or too grainy when scanned, keep exposures on target, keep the camera steady, and use the optimum f-stop/shutter speed combination for the lighting conditions.

 

However, I do find that a scan from a 35-year old well-exposed Kodachrome II slide beats anything I can do when scanning current 35mm films; i.e., obtaining excellent sharpness at 4000 dpi with little to very moderate grain.

Les, the two scans using NikonScan were done first, and then the two SilverFast scans were done next using an exposure level that made them roughly equivalent in brightness level to the two NikonScans.

 

The cropped sections come from the same center portion of each scan and represent about 5% of the total area of the complete image.

 

Start at the upper left of each frame and move across the top of the frame on through the colored areas of the carousel. There is slightly less noise in the SilverFast frames.

 

But is the difference enough to make any real difference? Subjectively "No"

<p>Per Les Sarile's request for a comparison test, I did four scans of the same dense, somewhat dirty Kodachrome II slide using: NikonScan at 1x; NikonScan at 16x; SilverFast at 1x; and SilverFast at 16x.</p>

<p>The same small section of the image is extracted from each scan for comparison purposes. Exposure control was used with both NikonScan and with SilverFast to make the scans roughly equivalent in brightness and contrast. All other scanning enhancement features of NikonScan and SilverFast were turned off -- ICE,DEE, ROC/GEM, DEE, AACO and so on.</p>

<p>Here are the results:</p>

<p> </p>

<a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/cg001/DiDarkroom/SBrim--NikonScan-01x.jpg">......... NikonScan at 1x (single pass)</a>

<p> </p>

<a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/cg001/DiDarkroom/SBrim--NikonScan-16x.jpg">......... NikonScan at 16x multi-sample</a>

<p> </p>

<a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/cg001/DiDarkroom/SBrim--SF-Ai-01x.jpg">......... SilverFast at 1x (single pass)</a>

<p> </p>

<a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/cg001/DiDarkroom/SBrim--SF-Ai-16x.jpg">......... SilverFast at 16x multi-sample</a>

<p> </p>

<p>Herewith is a little history about this slide. Last year, I fully restored the entire image taking about twenty hours to get it all just right. I first started by making two scans at different exposures using NikonScan. The two scans were merged in PS, and then a lot of manual work was done in Photoshop both to reduce noise and clean off the dirt. Here is the same section of the image after the manual corrections in Photoshop:</p>

<p> </p>

<a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/cg001/DiDarkroom/SBrim--FinalRestored.jpg">......... Restored section using PS and noise reduction plugins:</a>

<p>OK, does this test show 16x multi-sample in SilverFast is effective, all by itself, for noise reduction on a dense Kodachrome?</p>

<p>Well... On this particular slide, the results aren't conclusive.</p>

"John Kelly: Reports on multipass scanning indicate there's almost never an advantage ...."

 

With my CS 5000, I've found that Silverfast's multipass feature does an effective job of reducing noise on my scans, especially in the dense areas of contrasty Kodachromes. On the other hand, Nikon's own multipass feature has no visible effect on scans of Kodachrome, even at the 16x setting.

There it is, a classic case of flare, even if it comes from a Minolta. As for my Nikon CS 5000, I've pretty much despaired of Nikon ever fixing the flaring problems in their desktop scanners. The market for these devices isn't what one would think it should be, probably because the learning curve of getting into digital film scanning and digital post editing is so steep. So there isn't much incentive to make evolutionary improvements or to fix what is an obvious design defect in the product.

Gee, I thought only the Nikons had this problem. In those scanners, it's the window that covers the CCD that causes the ghosting.

 

Try reorienting the slide 180 degrees, or even flipping it over and scanning it reversed. I've also done things like making two scans at different exposure levels, extracting what I can from the shadows using Photoshop shadow/detail, and then merging the two images using layers.

 

I've also discovered that Silverfast does a better job than NikonScan of retrieving shadow detail while reducing noise in the dense areas, and this has the side benefit of making it easier to deal with the Nikon's flaring problems.

 

Noise in dense areas and bleed over from high contrast zones are the two problems that prevent these desktop scanners from being decent performance competitors for the Imacons and the drum scanners.

I've experienced drastically slower scanning speeds with my CS 5000 after unplugging the USB connector -- for one reason or another, e.g. cleaning dust from the motherboard -- and then plugging it into a different port than the original. Placing it back on the "favored" port fixed the problem straight away.

My experience with my CS5000 using ICE with Kodachrome is that it works three times out of four. Where it doesn't work on a particular slide, at least it takes enough out to simplify the post scan manual cleaning in Photoshop. ICE softens the image somewhat, creating ragged edges at high contrast boundaries. The softening effect varies from slide to slide based on nothing I can identify in particular. If I have an image where I want every last bit of detail that's on the slide, I forego ICE, bite the bullet, and clean it up manually in Photoshop.

Just as a point of interest here, I've taken Edward Ingold's advice about using Silverfast with the CS 5000 and find that it does a much better job of reducing noise in dense areas of Kodachromes when using multisampling than does NikonScan. But the software is expensive, however.

Edward Ingold: "In practice, a 10MP to 16MP DSLR image is comparable to a 6x4.5cm medium format scan. 35mm film is closer to 6MP, and is not a serious contender to digital on a quality basis."

 

If Kodachrome 25 was still around, there might be a case---albeit a weak one---that 35mm still has an edge in terms of resolution.

 

On a vacation I took last fall, I went back to my home town to fill in gaps in the photography for a book I'm putting together that includes Kodachromes from the 1940s on through the 1980s.

 

I took my six month old 5 MP Panasonic LUMIX and my thirty-three year old Minolta SRT-101 loaded with Elitechrome 100, shooting many scenes side-by-side, at least until I ran out of film. I went with only the Panasonic after that.

 

Basically, in comparing results after I was finished scanning the slides with my Coolscan 5000, it was a wash between one technology and the other. However, while in the field, I kept shooting with the Panasonic long after I had run out of film, and I had the results on my computer in a few minutes. The majority of the frames I eventually chose came from the Panasonic.

 

I've got enough experience with Photoshop that I now think I can register a series of photos taken over a 60 year period into a common esthetic as far as the look and feel of the underlying "grain." Not that the few remaining differences would matter all that much once these images go to the offset press.

 

At any rate, it is clear to me that for all practical purposes, film cameras no longer have an advantage over digital except in terms of serving someone's particular esthetic tastes. If production of 35mm slide film ever comes to a halt, I won't be missing it.

IMHO, 40,000 slides is still an awful lot of slides to get through in only a year.

 

In the late 1960s, when I first started taking pictures seriously---as opposed to taking lots of family & friends types of photos---I read an article in Modern Photography about Jay Maisel. His advice was to throw away any frame that didn't hit the mark as something definitely worth keeping.

 

This is what I did over a period of thirty-five years, throwing out roughly two-thirds of the slides that came back from the processor, with the result that my slide scanning task is much reduced in size and scope over what it might otherwise have been, allowing me to spend more time on those images worth spending time on.

 

I have a similar philosophy with my digital camera. I only download the images I want to keep, about one-third of the total frames shot, and the rest get tossed into the bit bucket. In comparison with film, it's obviously one heck of a lot cheaper to shoot and discard lots of frames in order to produce the one that's perfect.

 

Off topic, after playing with the demo version of Silverfast Ai for the last several weeks, I've decided to get a copy. It's multipass scanning feature actually does reduce noise, as opposed to NikonScan, and I'm able to pull more detail out of the shadows without resorting to the use of excessive Analogue Gain that results in greater problems with bleedover/flaring.

Les Sariles' advice on working the settings will probably get you going for using ICE on batch scans. In my own experience with the CS 5000, ICE does work with Kodachrome, but not consistently. I get decent results three times out of four---if I choose to use ICE instead of manual dust removal, which is a conscious choice I make for every slide I scan since ICE can affect the sharpness of the scan.

 

If the slide is too dirty or too scratched, ICE can't take care of everything, and the remainder of the cleanup has to be done manually. If one is truly after 40,000 slides, then your choices have to balance quality against quantity. I think you will also find with using ICE for Kodachrome is that while many slides turn out well, other similar ones don't, and for no apparent reason.

When my son was ordering a Macbook Pro for college work, he was leaning towards glossy. I convinced him to go matte and he's been thanking me ever since. His friends with glossy screens are being driven crazy by reflections in any place other than their dorm rooms.

I use my local Costco's Noritsu as my production machine, converting the Adobe 1998 16-bit TIF files into 8-bit JPEG files using a Noritsu colorspace profile I get from drycreekphoto. Files are ~10 meg in size after the conversion.

 

I just give the Costo staff my CD and they load the files into the Noritsu machine. This has worked so well that I have decided -- at least for now -- that I don't need the Epson R1800 I was thinking about buying.

 

Once I had gotten my monitor into a decent mode of calibration, I was amazed at how closely the Costco's Noritsu prints match what I see on my screen.

Philip, in scanning E6 films and color negative films with the Nikon, I have been able to get properly exposed and mostly consistent results frame-to-frame without much (if any) intervention, and without using ROC, GEM, DEE or Analog Gain.

 

But Kodachrome is different. It does not behave predictably from slide to slide. I have slides that seem to be similar to one another in contrast and color content but require widely different settings to get an acceptable scan. I also find that Kodachrome X and Kodachrome 64 with a contrasty image is the most difficult material to work with in getting a good scan. Kodochrome 25 and Kodachrome II seem to be easier to work with.

 

Dealing with flare is important because if you are trying to retrieve details in the shadows by increasing analog gain and using DEE, this aggravates the flaring problem, sometimes to the point where the output is unusable. If the image is valuable enough, and if it is just too difficult for the Nikon to capture properly even with multiple scans merged in Photoshop, I now send it off for a drum scan.

 

Of course, the reason I'm doing scanning with a Nikon is to affordably restore and preserve a relatively limited number of mostly Kodachrome images, the ones I think are the cream-of-crop of my photography. I'm not trying to efficiently create an electronic archive of a relatively large Kodachrome slide collection.

 

If the slide you have posted is a representative example, I would say that you should live with a somewhat underexposed image for your base archive and then correct it as needed in Photoshop as you are retrieving individual images for whatever purpose is intended.

Before commenting on Les' latest observations, I should talk about what I think of Silver Fast after using the demo version for looking at the CoolScan 5000 flare problem.

 

It's been two years since I last played with SilverFast, but I think this afternoon's experience indicates that it is decidedly easier to get an acceptable scan on the first trial run than it is with Nikon Scan. Is Silver Fast worth the extra money? Try out the demo version, compare it to Nikon Scan, and see which one you like better.

 

Regarding the comparison sections I posted, I did not use ICE for either scan. The choppiness is due solely to jpeg compression of the final combined image to get it below 100k size.

 

Even with the jpeg compression artifacts, the halo is quite clearly visible on both of the close-up sections -- even if there is less contrast on the SilverFast version and even if the color balance is somewhat different. Had I wanted to, I suppose I could have tweaked the SilverFast contrast and color settings to produce a nearly identical result.

 

At any rate, the high resolution versions show the strong similarity in the two flaring patterns much more clearly. What I see on the high res versions is enough to satisfy my own curiosity as to whether the particular software being used might be the source of, or a significant contributor to, the basic problem. I still think the CCD's window is the problem.

Les: I downloaded the demo version Silver Fast and then scanned a slide using the Coolscan 5000, one which had flaring problems using Nikon Scan. The native slide itself has no visible flaring or bleeding on it, and past optical enlargements show no evidence of a problem.

 

The results are shown below. Comparable sections are extracted from each scan, with the Nikon Scan first and the Silver Fast scan second.

 

The scans done with both software products exhibit the flaring problem in ways that are exactly identical. The color balance from each scan is slightly different, but that is to be expected.

 

Note that in each extracted section, the area above and behind the horse's head is fogged and that there is a distinct halo at the contrast boundary. Each halo is the same size and shape on both the Nikon Scan and on the Slver Fast scan.

 

There is also bleed-over at the top of the frame boundary on both scans which has exactly the same shape on each scan.

 

The flaring problem is most likely inside the scanner, and based on the analysis given in the other thread, it is most likely the CCD's protective window.<div></div>

Les, I bought my CS 5000 from B&H as well, soon after they started receiving the initial shipments. My unit had to have been one of the first out of the factory sent to the US market.

 

One of the reasons I chose it over the Minolta 5400 was that its focusing lense had greater depth of field, an advantage which has proven extremely important once I started removing my slides from their original cardboard mounts.

 

In other posts on photo.net over the last three or four months, various evidence has been presented which strongly points to the CCD's protective window as the culprit in the flaring problem; and apparently --- based on what we read in these forums -- most of the units suffer from it to one degree or another. So it's not the Nikon software that's the direct source of the problem, at least in regard to flaring.

 

The CCD isn't manufactured by Nikon, but one would think that flaring had to be a recognized problem when the CS 5000 was in beta testing, and that the Nikon engineers were smart enough to pin the blame where it belonged.

 

It is rather a contradiction that Nikon will use the best of their optical glass for the focusing lense, but employ a CCD which degrades the quality of the image, nulifying the advantages of Nikon's own ED optics.

 

We haven't seen a new release of Nikon Scan in several years, even though 4.0.2 has several known bugs. This indicates to me that Nikon has put film scanning on the back burner as a corporate marketing priority.

 

Too bad... If they had a fix for the flaring problem at a reasonable price for units now out of warranty, I'd gladly pay it.