john_simon5

<p>There is no software that I am aware of that you can use to automatically remove dust and scratches from B&W (silver-based) scans (it is a hardware limitation). That said, in scanning 40 year-old B&W negatives on a Coolscan 5000 I found that dust and scratches were nowhere near the sort of problem they are with colour negatives. Using the healing brush to remove dust spots and scratches is pretty easy with Photoshop - but I haven't felt the need to bother with that for any but the photos I plan to enlarge.</p>

<p>(However, I tend to scan the B&W negatives as positive and invert because the canned profile for B&W film in NikonScan clips highlights and applies a strong contrast curve that does not look appealing to my eye.)</p>

<p>That effect is highly reminiscent of what happens when you use ICE with Kodachrome. Or, as you remark, B&W film. Your identification of it being batch related does point towards a problem with the processing.</p>

<p>There seems to be a bit of confusion about colour profiles. (I'm not sure if it's accurate to say Mac's are 'wonky' - they are generally better than Windows machines at dealing with colour profiles but historically had a different 'gamma'.) Even though it isn't the core issue it's one I can, hopefully, shed some light on.<br /> There is a difference between display/printer profiles and working space profiles and you should not mix the two up. A display profile tells the computer how your monitor displays a given RGB value. For example, (100,100,100) may display slightly red on your monitor. The computer can then calculate what set of RGB values it needs to display in order to get an objective grey. So, for example, if (100,100,100) is slightly red, it will send the monitor the signal (98,100,100) to generate a grey output. It is more or less the same with a printer profile - just telling the computer exactly how it will print a given RGB triplet.<br /> A working space is one way of assigning numbers to the universe of colours we can see. There are obviously a myriad of ways of assigning those numbers. While (100,100,100) is going to be grey in almost any RGB working space, it might be a brighter shade of grey in one rather than the other. And (255,0,0) is a different intensity/shade of red in Adobe RGB than in sRGB.<br /> Now, once an image is assigned a working space that is a statement of how the numbers in that file correspond to objective colours. If you change the working space you will change the colours. The display profile, on the other hand is kind of used in reverse by the computer to work out how to display the objective colours on your imperfect display in a way that looks closest to the 'true' colours represented in the file.<br /> Bottom line, as people have advised, is to get a calibrator that can determine exactly how your monitor displays various RGB triplets so that the computer can use that information to more accurately display your images. Built in profiles are better than nothing, but only very approximately. And using a working space profile (e.g. Adobe RGB) as a display profile is worse than nothing.</p>

<p>I have an iP4300 and OS X and have had trouble getting good prints from Photoshop CS4. I can get good prints from iPhoto if I use ColourSync to manage colour and make sure I select the appropriate paper profile (selecting 'automatic' usually works for me - Ian you want to use ColourSync not Canon to get decent prints here). On the other hand, I am not convinced that I can actually disable the print driver and print straight through using OS X 10.6.4 and 'Photoshop manages colour' in Photoshop because the driver options for colour management are not enabled. Certainly the prints I get out are usually unlike what I see on my monitor.<br>

Thus, while I understand what I need to do to get good prints in theory, I don't seem to be able to achieve it in practice with Photoshop CS4 on a Mac using a Canon printer.</p>

<p>Ian, if you do get good results, can you post your final recipe so I can implement it on my system. (It has never been sufficiently important for me to work it out as I just print happy snap from home and do it from iPhoto.)</p>

<p>My original scans are 48 bit. The reason my workflow appears to work is that I am scanning these slowly at home. I <strong>want</strong> to look at each image to rediscover the past. So I scan a small batch and then spend a couple of minutes with each tweaking them. So, for example, there is a roll of film from 1978 scanning as I type. I'll edit them tomorrow night and find out what treasures it holds (my brother's 6th birthday I believe).</p>

<p>I am doing a similar project but had decided on a slightly different route. I get the TIFFs and edit them quickly in Photoshop (given colour fading the most important is auto colour then cropping the scan margins). These will be kept as my negatives in a simple folder structure on an external HD. I then use the batch converter to convert them to quality 10 JPEGs for use in iPhoto by myself and my family. These files are indistinguishable from the original TIFFs on the screen and take up around 7MB each. It is here that I will add all the metadata to them. The 'link' will be maintained through the file name. If I want to gussy one up for printing, I'll go to the original and then reimport from there.</p>

<p>This breaks the link between the version one uses normally and the high-quality original; but I expect my resort to the original to be minimal. The other thing is that, even with a fast drive, 130MB takes a lot longer to load and browse than 7MB. I guess if you get your thumbnail solution working that problem goes away though.</p>

<p>The other consideration that is relevant to 'quality' is robustness and longevity. Will it be just as good a year (or two) from now? Inkjets have made leaps and bounds on this front recently but it is still inherently a more fragile product. And unless you are careful with the printer you select and the process you use, you could end up with a very faded print a year from now, or one that has picked up an unsightly blemish because of some moisture getting on the print.</p>

<p>What Andrew said.<br>

For photography the graphics card is not taxed. Most important (given the capabilities of the base machine) is RAM. Both have 4GB RAM which is a pretty good starting point, but, given that you are working with 250MB+ files could fill up quickly. (I work with 130MB TIFF 35mm scans and the current 2GB on my MBP is inadequate.) Historically, Apple prices for RAM upgrades were high but you should compare the Apple price with the cost of getting 2x2GB 3rd party sticks to upgrade the RAM (it looks like the iMac has 4 slots for RAM and comes with 2x2GB - confirm this before purchase).<br>

I'd plan on doing primary editing on the internal hard drive and then offloading once you are done editing. Unless you get an eSATA drive it will be hard to compete with the speed of the internal - even with FW800.</p>

<p>I am digitising old slides for archival purposes (just family happy snaps really).</p>

<p>My approach has been similar to yours - get something close to a raw scan out of the scanner and do everything else in Photoshop. I adjust my scan to ensure there is no clipping of any channel and then let it rip. In most cases (with a Coolscan 5000) this amounts to fully automatic scanning with everything off or neutral. The reason is that Photoshop is a better image editor than Nikonscan and practically all of the controls in the scanning software are post scanning image editing tools. Why would I do image editing in a program that isn't really an image editor (even though it can do a bit of it)?</p>

<p>This approach also means that if I do something silly in editing, I have a raw file to fall back on without having to spend the time rescanning the original.</p>

<p>When you say Vuescan fine mode worsens the problem - do you mean that the combing affects more lines? That is, you get the same artifact, but instead of it being every 8 lines (maybe it is 9 if it is a multiple of 3) it is every 2 or 3 lines?</p>

<p>I continue to learn. All very, er, illuminating.</p>

<p>I am thinking, however, that the artifact noted in my OP isn't CCD blooming. It may be related to the electronics in some way but it doesn't look like the sort of examples illustrated in the articles. It is just too regular in its pattern across scan lines - if it was blooming I would have expected it to affect every scan line rather than just every 8th (or so).<br>

Anyone got any other ideas for what it might be? Other than Roger, has anyone else observed this artifact on their Coolscan scans?</p>

<p>Thanks for the info. Reading the description it sounds like what Fuji are calling CCD smear is what I was thinking of as CCD blooming - it may just be a terminological difference.</p>

<p>I just came across an interesting example on the web. While not directed at this issue at all I believe I can see the same effects in the two Coolscan scans shown here <a href="http://www.webweavertech.com/ovidiu/weblog/archives/000448.html">http://www.webweavertech.com/ovidiu/weblog/archives/000448.html</a><br>

The author doesn't mention what driving software was used, but in the 1x scan there is noticeable combing that is absent with 4x multisample.</p>

<p>I must say that I am rethinking whether or not I should have multisample on as part of my default settings. Received wisdom was that it made practically no difference. But with Kodachromes there is a noticeable difference - there is invariably a dark area where multisampling cleans up the noise and with the additional consideration of this combing artifact I'm thinking that the time is worth it.</p>

<p>I use Nikonscan, so there are circumstances where you can still get it with Nikonscan - although it sounds like lower levels of multisample are effective in Nikonscan vs VueScan.</p>

<p>It is comforting to know that someone else gets the same artifacts - that suggests to me that it is potentially inherent to the LS-5000. And multisample scanning pretty much cures it so it's not too annoying at the moment. But I'm still hoping to understand it.</p>

<p>In the second image I'm focusing on the surrounds of the white area and the way it is yellow with a purple line every 8 or so pixels (and the reverse on the bottom of the white area). I don't think that is of analogue origin. You can also see it a bit on the top of the diagonal grey at the bottom.<br>

(If anyone cares, these are closeups of the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne.)</p>

<p>In another scan I noticed there was a bit of colour to this. Same effect just slightly different presentment. The picture below is a 200% crop.</p><div></div>

<p>I was recently scanning some Kodachromes using my Coolscan 5000 and I noticed an odd combing artifact while pixel peeping to fix dust (see picture below - a 200% crop from the area of the slide where it occurred). It happens occasionally at high contrast boundaries like the one shown and is vertical along the orientation of the scan line (the short axis of the slide). But it didn't happen in very similar areas of the same slide and it is certainly not prevalent in my scans. Can anyone identify this artifact? My initial research has suggested this might be CCD blooming. Is it? It is consistent from scan to scan in this manner but is obviously digital in origin and not on the slide. Following the thinking that it might be CCD blooming or something like that I thought that slowing down the scan speed as it moved from row to row might help to give time for the excess charge to drain. Turning on multisample scanning pretty much cures it - 2x is not quite enough, but 4x and the effect is gone.</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

<p>Using a small colour space might have something to do with it - but only in reverse. Larger colour spaces are more prone to banding than smaller colour spaces because you have to spread the same 256 values (assuming 8 bit) over a larger space. But if you are using 16 bits it is irrelevant because 16 bits is enough for any colour space.</p>

<p>I don't worry about it too much because I don't do any editing in NikonScan. NikonScan associates AdobeRGB with the file at my request and when I edit it in Photoshop it all looks reasonable (but I'm dealing with 50 year old slides where accurate colour is a relative term).</p>

<p>I have no idea about processing. It was done in Australia and Kenya when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. The older Kodacolor-X is pretty good (if a little un-natural). But the Kodacolor-II from 1974-1978 that I've done so far is pretty bad. It might be getting marginally better the closer to the present I get, but it is all very green out of the box and requires significant adjustment to get close to natural; I always end up with clipped highlights for at least two of RGB when it is looking natural - presumably from dye fading. By way of contrast, mixed in with the Kodacolor-II from the mid-70s is the occasional "Pacific Colour Film" that is very good. If the processing was done in the same places this still points to there being something sub-standard about the Kodacolor-II.</p>

<p>Based on my sample of 40-50 year old slides and colour negatives I would say the absolute worst for stability is Kodacolor II and Agfa CN S colour negatives. Everything else has been basically recoverable in post. The CN S had gone blotchy which is pretty much impossible to deal with with my skills. By comparison, the Perutz is wonderful.<br>

I didn't find much information about the technical qualities of the slide film using Google. A few other people asking what this film is and a nice history of the company.</p>

<p>Finally came across a frame with identification on it: Perutz Color C18</p>

<p>Anyone know anything about this film?</p>

<p>I am scanning my father's collection of slides and have come across a rather odd film type that is creating some confusion for me. I can best describe this film by the way it behaves when being scanned - hence my posting here for some information. I am scanning using a Coolscan 5000 with NikonScan software.</p>

<p>The film is about 50 years old. It behaves approximately half way between Kodachrome and other slide film in that ICE creates artifacts - but not as many as with Kodachrome. Scanning with the settings of Kodachrome and ICE I get good scans without any artifacts (something that can't be said of actual Kodachrome on the 5000); scanning with normal ICE creates artifacts along light/dark boundaries. For this and the reasons mentioned below I don't think it actually is Kodachrome, but it certainly isn't like the Agfa slides which form the bulk of the non-Kodachrome collection.<br>

Looking at the film it is very thick and dense on the emulsion side (probably accounting for the ICE problems) and has some patterning like on Kodachrome, but without the silvery etched look of Kodachrome. The colours are quite saturated. Furthermore, all of the slides I've seen so far are suffering from a red shift in a way that the Kodachromes aren't. In some cases I've thought that they were heat affected from spending too long in a projector, but they are the only frames looking like that in the slide collection so that doesn't seem likely. On a few of the slides that are in reclosable plastic mounts I've opened them up and haven't seen any markings on the film margins to identify it other than the fact that frame numbers are in half-frame increments (that is, numbers running up to 60 or 70 with 2 per frame) rather than full frame numbering as is used these days. Any suggestions for what this is?</p>

<p>(I've also come across some B&W Gavaert slides that look really sweet. Very fine grained and with a slight sepia tint. These are less of a mystery, but look really good compared with many of the B&W negatives I've been scanning from this era.)</p>

<p>The resale market for 5000 is crazy right now. They have been discontinued so used ones are currently going for more than they were when new (sometime lots more). In the days, they held their resale value very well and you would only loose a few hundred max.</p>

<p>Anyway, I am doing a similar project with a 5000. I have processed about 500 slides from the 70s and have about 1500 more from the 50s through 80s to do. I am from the scan them once and scan them at max school. This may be because the coolscan is fast - particularly with Kodachromes because there is no overhead for ICE. Unfortunately I don't have the slide feeder so it is a bit labour intensive. I scan at 4000dpi, 16 bit, Adobe RGB, TIFF. In Photoshop I crop the frame and 'auto colour' if required. If there are particularly egregious spots or scratches I give them a quick touch up. This is then my archived copy. I use the image processor in Photoshop to convert them to sRGB JPEGs which I stick into iPhoto for everyday use and 4x6 printing. I don't bother resizing the JPEG image from the full scan size. My JPEGs end up around 7MB which is about the same size as a current digicam shot so I don't see that there is much imperative for reducing the file size more. If I want to do an enlargement, I'll pull out the TIFF and give it personalised attention including sharpening and touchup as appropriate.<br>

N.B. I also have quite a lot of negative film from this time period. If you have any colour negatives from this period scan them NOW - they are not stable and the images go to hell. If you don't scan them now, you probably won't ever be able to scan them. As it is with some of mine, I can barely recover a tolerable imageas the colour shifts and dye fading are so bad.</p>