don_gallagher

Very nice photo. In my edit, I I tried focusing attention on the river by converting to B&W in LR, cropping in, and lightened the river to emphasize it in the photo .

Forgot to ask you about this, Don. Have you done this with prints? I have plenty of old B&W prints that have curled plenty. Also some color prints from the 60s. I'm deathly afraid of trying any humidifying experiment to flatten them out!

 

Hi James, yes we often have to "loosen" prints and curled negatives. What I do is create a little humidity chamber using a plastic storage container, a plastic table of about the same size as the container, a warm mist humidifier, and care. What I do is get the humidifier going, then drag the inverted container off the edge of the table to allow the humidity to rise into the chamber. It doesn't take much to deposit a thin coating of water on the walls of the container: you don't want too much or else it will start to "rain" drops on the photos. When the correct amount of humidity is in, then I drag the container back into place on the table, sealing the humidity in. It takes a little practice to get it right so I would test the technique on some less precious photos.

We have been scanning family photos for awhile now, having inherited my grandparent's photos. We are using a V600 which does fine for prints and have also used it to scan old larger negatives taken in the 1920s from my grandfather's Brownie. The V600 does an ok job with these larger negatives (we humidify and flatten the negatives between optical glass for scanning). The 1920 negatives still provide better scans than the existing prints. For 35 mm negatives, we are spoiled in still having a working Nikon Scan 4, so I just scan the entire roll and keep what is appropriate. For my parent's 35 mm negatives, rolls of family event photos could be taken over two years, so I actually find having the entire roll and order to be useful in assigning dates to the photos. For previewing the 35 mm negs with the V600, you could try to sandwich a couple between optical glass, but it seems like you could only do 2 negative pieces at a time that way: that may be too slow for your needs.

I focused on the man and the fog by cropping. Used LR texture and mild dehazing to accentuate the rock wall but keep the fog. Increased R,O,Y saturation to bring out wall colors in the wall

Cropped to minimize centered tree, increased red, orange, yellow saturation, increased contrast, texture, contrast, and dehaze in LR. Added a minor negative edge vignette.

 

<p>It may be due to low humidity. I have "loosened" strongly curled negatives by treatment in a little humidity chamber I made out of a plastic storage box. You have to be careful not to overdue it and let the negatives get wet or sticky, but a humidified negative is less taught when being fit into a holder. I get the box to ~ 50% relative humidity with a brief filling from a humidifier, then let the negatives sit for awhile. You will want to scan relatively quickly once you take the negative out of the chamber because as the negative dries out it will curl back.</p>

<p>I have used the approach that Jos and Ed addressed. I bought a relatively cheap ($100 several years ago) basic Garmin (ETrexH) that is quite good about finding a signal and has been pretty accurate based on photos I took of gravestones in cemeteries; much better than iPhone tagging of photos taken at the same time. The GP-E2 seems like a very expensive alternative. It is very easy to download a track and apply to the photos using Lightroom or other software. The only thing you have to be careful about is having the time synced between the GPS and camera, but there are software fixes to adjust for that if needed.<br>

<br />The other thing that I have tried to find is someone's assessment on how the GP-E2 or 6D GPS units stack up against a regular GPS unit. Does anyone know if they are as accurate?</p>

<p>Eye control on the Elan IIe worked very well for my wife and I; she has very strong prescription glasses and I have none. When we got an EOS3 she could never get that ECF to work for her with glasses.</p>

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<p>We had both the Elan IIe and the EOS-3. The Elan IIe worked well with both me (no glasses) and my wife (fairly heavy prescription lenses). The EOS-3 would not work for my wife with her glasses no matter what we tried. We don't know what changed in the design between the two. I tended to use the ECF when composing landscapes, but usually for birds and animals I used the center focus point and recomposed.<br>

<br />We're all digital now but last time I checked the Elan IIe was still firing. The EOS-3 had some sort of error (I forget the error code). I had it fixed once but a couple of years later the same error code popped up. That was the excuse to move into digital...</p>

<p>A variation similar to Curt's suggestion is that folder security may be set so you don't have full control (read/write/modify etc). Windows 7 tends to do this with external drives it thinks are "Archives"</p>

<p>Hi Csaba,<br>

If you want "raw" positive images, then in the output tab you should select "Raw Save Film" and select "Raw Output with: Save"<br>

What this will do is perform the inversion to positive and apply whatever infrared cleaning you are doing. Unlike saving as a regular TIFF, it will not apply any setting you have in the Color tab (other than your selection of type of negative film. I believe this is how Vuescan decides what color mask to compensate for).<br>

As people have mentioned above, if you choose "Raw Output with: Scan" you will get a negative image.</p>

 

<p>Just checking that you were not in the "Previous Import" window of the catalog? If you edit in PS and return, it will not show up in this window; you would need to view the primary folder</p>

<p>RoboGeo is a program that has the functionality you describe. In the past have used it to generate kmz files for Google Earth (along with the track from our GPS) to show a "trip" on a map.<br>

However, we use LR and since LR 4 allows us to look at a group of photos on the map and include a GPS track, RoboGeo and GoogleEarth are extra steps that we no longer need for these functions (GoogleEarth is still cool for other things, of course)</p>

<p>Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it appears that the price is $199 for the Photoshop upgrade. It also says that you can upgrade from CS3 and higher at this price until the end of the year, at which point the upgrade is only good from CS5 to CS6. That doesn't address whether people should upgrade, of course.<br>

We will probably end up upgrading. We use it a lot with our older scanned photos and some of the features look like they would be useful.</p>

<p>We use a Garmin eTrex H (a very basic unit) to log a GPS track. It runs on two AA batteries and generally lasts an entire day. We use RoboGeo to correlate the GPS tracks with the photos and as long as you make sure that your camera time is correct it works fine.</p>

<p>LR4 64 bit running on Windows 7 isn't showing this behavior. They might be Mac-specific problems</p>

<p>I don't use noise reduction when scanning. When I am scanning negatives I also use the Noise Ninja plugin, as Lightroom doesn't seem to be as effective on negative film grain (or at least the settings I have tried). Sometimes I can get away with Lightroom noise reduction on slides, but I usually use Noise Ninja.</p>

<p>You can't preview a bigger area. As Dan mentioned, turning off frame alignment can help, although I have found that it works pretty well most of the time. With frame alignment I find that you still need to use an offset, but the combination of the two usually works. The odd thing (with my scanner anyway) is that it seems like the offset is almost quantum: it either takes a small (usually ~0.298) or larger (3.3) offset-nothing in the middle. Maybe it's tied to how the spokes work.<br>

The one thing that will confuse frame alignment is very dark regions on the edge of the photo, as frame alignment works by assuming dark (i.e. light negative) is delineating the edges of the negative.</p>

<p>The 100-400 would be a good choice for the Wild Animal Park. I don't think the ultra-wide will do too much for you at the Wild Animal Park (or Zoo Safari or whatever they are calling it this week).<br>

If you are going soon to the WAP, winter is great because the animals are out and more active during most of the day. If you like to photograph waterfowl the lagoon is great for both the captive exotics and the native non-captive birds. They are there for the free food and are very approachable, and at this time of year their plumage should be in good shape.<br>

As Peter said, be very careful with the shows at Seaworld with your camera. We sat far back at the dolphin show and still got soaked. Our camera was protected so it was fine, but I never thought the water would reach us...</p>

<p>Like Steve, we would bring a couple of heavy-duty ziplocs. When we reached our destination, we would stop at a supermarket, buy some rice, and fill the bag as needed. Before leaving we would throw out the rice.</p>

<p>We have found that Photomatix works well for us, although we tend to use it mildly to make photos that (hopefully) still look natural and not "cooked". We also have CS5 but find the HDR function less intuitive to use, although I can't say we spent that much time trying.</p>

<p>In don't know of any program that will pull the date out of the file name, but we are also archiving our old negatives. We use EXIFTool with the EXIFTool GUI interface. This will at least let you batch edit the exif DateTimeOriginal (and other date) fields in a batch for a single date, so you can process several photos taken on the same day at once.</p>

<p>We use a Garmin eTrex H and it is pretty good about finding a signal. We use RoboGeo and are pretty happy with it for geocoding. It works on RAW files as well as JPGs, so if you want to geocode raw files make sure your chosen software can do that. It does both auto geocoding from a tracklog and also allows us to geocode our older scanned photos and we have used it for a few years now. The only issue we have had is that as we have upgraded to a computer with no serial ports, it's a little more complicated to transfer data because RoboGeo can't find our serial port-USB adapter. We use EasyGPS freeware to transfer from the Garmin to a GPX file, then use that file in RoboGeo.</p>

<p>A couple of things I could think of:<br>

If you typed in the path could there be an error in it? If you used the @ button the path should be correct.<br>

Are you running Windows 7? If so, could there be a security setting issue where you cannot write to the folder?<br>

If you can't find anything, try reinstalling Vuescan.</p>