james_derose3

I'll look into this, but speed isn't as crucial for me as preservation for this project. The V600 is ONLY for prints and most of my prints are much smaller than 3x5 with about a quarter of them already having sustained damage. I wouldn't want to put those photos in any kind of automated system. Thanks for the suggestions, and i'll look at that Kodak! -James

Thanks! Reading up, it looks like i might be safer sticking with resolutions that multiply easily into the maximum optical resolution of the scanner. I think the v600 has a max resolution of 6400dpi, so 800 might be a good one to play with. Slightly higher than the recommended 600. I just went through my photos and of the ones i'm concerned with scanning prints, they are 95% black and white (or sepia tones) from the 40s-50s and mostly smaller than 3x5. (I've got a lot of 2x3 and 2x2 with a couple of passport photo size) The ones smaller than 3x5 are the ones i'm most interested in scanning at a higher resolution. I also read that, with a higher resolution, I could run into an issue with paper texture. Fortunately, most of the textured prints I have are 4x6 or larger. The tiny ones are mostly glossy b&w prints. -James

And one more question - about resolution. Some print photos (most) would probably be fine at 600dpi as I might want to enlarge them "one size" (as in a 3x5 to a 4x6 or thereabouts) or crop a little bit and some need some cleanup of creases and imperfections. Some, though, i've had to scan at 1200 dpi (smaller 1x1 or 1x2 photos) to get enough detail to clean them up. I'd obviously not print these any larger than maybe baseball card size, but I still want to do some cleanup. Other than perceived time scanning (i'll get to the "perceived" part in a second), is there any reason not to just scan everything at 1200dpi and adjust later? I say "perceived" as I'm trying to separate the scanning step from the evaluation and corrections step. If I can scan everything in vuescan as a raw 1200dpi image at 48bit color, I can get everything scanned in one or two afternoons. The "rescanning" can then happen anywhere (the office, home, wherever) where I open the raw file, one by one and sort based on whether or not vuescan's color corrections are good, whether there's damage, color vs black and white, etc) I think the breaking up of the actual scanning and everything else will be the biggest saver of time (as it will allow me to use time almost anywhere for the rest of the process) and allowing me to scan at one resolution for all the flatbed photos will aid in that. I'll also have an archive of raw scan data that I can "rescan" should i end up not liking the color corrections from vuescan in the future, etc. So, basically, other than storage space and time to do the actual scan, is there any downside to scanning at 1200dpi vs 600? The streamlining will save time and storage space is not an issue. -James

Thanks for the extremely detailed response! I'll be splitting this up between my flatbed for prints and my Nikon Coolscan for slides and negatives. I probably have a total of 100 slides in this project and they're easy to go through. The negatives are a little more tricky, but i've worked out a system for identifying what I need to scan right now and what I don't need to bother with. I'm going roll by roll, previewing on a Kodak Scanza and then putting them in archival pages. Photos with family get a blue dot on the outside of the page, other noteworthy slides get a yellow dot. Once they are scanned with the Coolscan (haven't gotten that far yet), they get a green dot. This was the part of the workflow most daunting to me - reviewing envelopes and envelopes of negatives! One step at a time. I'm working on getting everything scanned in and then I will work on any restoration, color correction, cropping and resizing. For the transparencies, i'll be using RAW dng files from vuescan and then converting them in lightroom with negative lab pro. I want to get all of the raw scans FIRST, though, and then i'll work on that portion. Once i'm there, i'll be working on what you've listed above (fixed sizes, tagging, fixes, etc.). I've tagged this post for followup when I get there. Thanks! -James

"toy-snap" - I like that!

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!

Thanks, Greg. Actually, the V600 can only hold 4 or 6 slides (I forget which) and 2 6 image film strips. The light source isn't wide enough to accommodate the 12 slide holders that the V800 has. That's all moot, though, as I've got the Coolscan that I want to scan the good 35mm and 110 (if there IS such a thing as good 110? I already have 110 holders coming for both the v600 and the coolscan - so i'm covered) images with. As far as scanning these goes, I want to be once and done with the images that I decide to digitize. They will/may serve several purposes. The main purpose is archiving for the future, but some MAY get printed at the lab no larger than 8x10. This will, of course, all depend on the photos. I have some photo booth/passport photo style photos of my grandfather during the war that I may try to blow up to 3x3 (they are less than 2x2 right now) if they're not horribly out of focus to create an 8x8 image 4 pictures in it. All of the pictures will be stored in several places. I already use lightroom, but will probably export the final jpegs for use in a google photo album. As well as printing in photo books. Thanks for that, Don. It sounds as if we are doing a similar project. Most of the transparencies I have are from the late 30s and early 40s and have already begun to crack. It's unfortunate. Fortunately, they don't make up the bulk or any significant portion of what I have. One, in fact, is mounted inside a matte and displayed in a scrapbook. You can barely see it, obviously. What's cool is that my lab was able to recover a lot of detail from it. Unfortunately, it's also not anywhere near in focus and has a ton dust spots all over it. The dust is easy to get rid of, but it's diminishing returns when it's nowhere near focus anyway! I like your idea of scanning the whole 35mm role in a batch rather than going through it. I can do that with strips on my Coolscan V as I have the SA-21 strip adapter. I can't do that with 110, though. I went ahead and got a Kodak Scanza for cheaper than the DIGITNOW device i listed above. I'm glad I got it cheap and second hand. What a hunk of junk! I expected the image quality to not be great, but the mechanism is crappy as well. I've been carefully going through the 110 stuff I have and have to say that i'd be PISSED if i spent the time scanning these on the Coolscan (with a custom holder, one frame at a time) or even on the V600 a whole strip at a time. I would say that, out of a whole role, there are maybe 6 keepers. They are all vacation photos from when I was a kid and mostly include destination pictures rather than family. One last thing here - I started scanning some photos on the flatbed last night to try and get a workflow down. I'm pretty solid with transparencies on the Coolscan as I used to scan my own slides I used to take. But with prints, i'm not so solid. I'm having a hard time coming to terms with resolution and filetypes. Conventional wisdom, as far as i'm aware, is to scan at 300dpi if you plan on printing, 600dpi if you plan on enlarging or archiving. I know it varies depending on how large you plan on printing, obviously, but i'm looking for the maximum resolution I should be scanning at for archiving that won't harm my choices down the road. For example, if I scanned at 1200dpi and then outputted 300dpi from lightroom or photoshop when sending to my lab for printing, am I losing anything over scanning at 600dpi or 300dpi and doing the same? I just want to make sure enough data is captured in case I need to edit or adjust the photos. (Also, does the math matter? I'm an audio guy as well and, when we talk about sample rate, sometimes it's easier to sample down when you're working with multiples. So, for example, if my print target is always 300dpi, should I be working with 300, 600, 900, 1200?) I should note that I am not concerned even a little bit about file SIZE. The archived original scans can take up as much room as they want. Storage is cheap. And then as far as file type. I work in Lightroom most of all and am used to camera raw files. I also scan transparencies as raw DNG files as I have much more control when i'm in lightroom. For flatbed photos, should I bother? Or should I do a TIFF and go straight to photoshop for color correction and repair of damage?

Yeah - I definitely wouldn't use the v600 for scanning slides or film. I have one or two transparencies larger than 35mm that I just took to my local lab to do. They get me the raw scan for about a buck a scan. can't beat that. For the rest of my transparencies (35mm and 110), they'll go to my Coolscan. The A7Riii is on my list for the future (I have an a6000 right now), but not today. Maybe when I get that i'll move into that territory. I don't have any autofocus macro lenses at the moment, but will probably do so once I move up to the A7. Yeah - I probably could! And with these old family snaps, especially the 110 film, i'll probably spend more time than I should processing after the scan...i'm a tweaker. But it sounds like you got it for the same reasons I did. My workflow will be sorting first, scanning after. And at home (where i'll be sorting), I don't have the space for any kind of scanning or even computer setup to do much.

Thanks Ed, I couldn't agree more. Not only do I not want to scan twice, I suspect I won't even want to scan 80% of it ONCE. That's why I was thinking of something like this as a "digital loupe" so to speak. Pretty much using it for a different purpose than intended. I've got a handheld lightbox that I use for slides that has a loup, and a lightbox built in. I push in the mounted slide, it lights up and I see the slide at about 2x magnification nice and bright on a screen. I'd be using this digitnow device in a similar way for my negatives - especially the 110s. I'm sure I don't have many keepers of those. As for scanning vs deciding what to scan, you're also right there as well. But the deciding what to scan part is also going to be the deciding what to keep and archive part. I've got photomat envelopes upon photomat envelopes of negatives. It's great that my mother saved them...but I know I also don't want to keep all of them. I thought about going the camera scan route. Is that what you do? I might consider that once I get a full frame, but that's not in the cards for a little while. The Coolscan is what I have now - and it's a good scanner.

Indeed! But even that would be tough to identify if there are people or places in a 110 negative are worth saving ;). I was thinking of using that device as my "digital loupe," really - with the advantage of turning the negative to positive.

Sorry for the late response. Had some medical emergencies (all is well now!) at home. I didn't mean to imply with my quotes that you said anything about scanning! I was just trying to be clear that I wasn't too concerned with the specs of the machine whatsoever as I wouldn't be using it for any of my real scanning duties. That's what the Coolscan V is for. And thank you, everyone else, for the suggestions as well. Archiving will be a bit difficult as I know most of the people i'm saving, but don't have the foggiest ideas of dates outside of my grandfather in uniform, which I know date somewhere between 1942 (when he was in basic and then a drill sergeant here in the US) to 1945 when he was in Europe. I'm a bit sit with the prints as far as that goes. The negatives are MOSTLY from the 1980s forward with a few sets from the 1970s. My main thing there, and the reason I was looking to weed some out with this solution, is to weed out the people who don't matter (to me). It's a nice suggestion to scan ALL of the negatives in low res just in case, but the reality is that if i have a roll of 24 from a trip to Ft. Henry in 1984 and 6 of them are my family and the rest are other tourists or museum employees, I don't want to bother digitizing those other 18 photos. I'll definitely be putting them in pages as they are digitized, so on those pages i'll have cataloged which ones are family, etc. Agreed - if they are posed pictures or in places i'm familiar with. But in my scenario above, it'll be near impossible to identify my father taking a picture of a canon in the background vs another tourist. Thanks for the help, guys! -James

To be clear, I have no intention of using this to "scan my slides." So as long as it functions the way it is advertised (real time previews on the little LCD, manual feed of film and quick "snaps to small jpegs" if I need them) I think it should do. It's one of the reasons I was looking at this vs something like the Kodak Scanza. May as well go as cheap as possible if i'm not worried about quality. I just want to use it as a glorified digital lightbox and MAYBE to snap some "proofs" if I need to send a snapshot quickly to someone in the family to ask if the picture is worth scanning. I thought about "proofing" on my v600 since I could grab 4 slides or 6 frames of film at a time, but even that would require extra effort - not to mention it would physically tie me to where my scanner is set up as well as a computer.

Hi All, Looking for some advice on a workflow for a large scanning project i'm up against. It's been awhile since i've scanned things but am determined to scan and archive all of the family photos I can get my hands on. Some are as new as a decade ago and some are close to 100 years old. I've had my local lab scan some of the prints, but decided to start getting this done all on my own. Since a lot of the older stuff requires restoration work, I may have to go back and adjust the scan anyway if i'm trying pull detail out of a faded photo, etc. For prints, i'll be using an Epson v600. I considered a v800 or v850, but I only have a couple transparencies larger than 35mm. I'm happy to let the lab do it. I just need the flatbed. For slides and film, i've got a Nikon Coolscan V. Software is Vuescan, Lightroom and Photoshop. I think i'm pretty set in the actual scanning and editing workflow, but input is always welcome. Where i'm moving off the rails a bit is going through all of the 35mm and 110 film. I can preview the slides well enough, but the negative film strips are tough to go through and identify people without seeing the positive, enlarged. So I started looking at these cheap, self contained film scanners. This one here shows the preview in realtime and you manually feed the film in: https://www.amazon.com/Jumbl-High-Resolution-Negative-Slide-Scanner/dp/B00ICOB78K I'm thinking with something like that I can quickly preview this film - especially the 110 stuff that I can barely see otherwise. If there's one where I need to call my mother about ("hey, do you know who this is?"), I can hit the button and snap a jpeg "proof" to send along. I also won't need to do this all where my scanner setup will be (at my office) and instead can sort through everything at home. Basically i'll be using it as a digital light box that I can flip negatives to positive in real time with the added bonus of snapping proofs. I see they also have them where you integrate your phone, but i'd rather something self contained. Any thoughts? Anyone who has done a project like this? How did YOU sort through all the negatives? -James