Originally posted by Steinback Hey Gooshin, do you have a post (or posts) somewhere here on the forums where you discuss your approach to scanning, or perhaps some suggested reading? I'm just getting started with an Epson V500 and I'm still reading up and trying to figure out what I can accomplish with it.
It's going to take years to get through the backlog but I've got thousands of frames of sports and stage photos (mostly on the cheapest film I could find at the time) sitting around the house, plus 20 years of my Dad's slides and another 20 of negative film to sort through.
i dont have a single post per se', just various nit picks here and there with regards to usage and what not.
there are a number of things to realize.
1. limitation of hardware, dedicated film scanners are better than flatbed scanners, their output is smaller in size and better in quality. However in the long run they are much more tedious to use. (and expensive)
2. software, there are a bunch of software, each interacts with scanners differently. Some is free (or comes with your scanner), some can be easily pirated (like VueScan), and some is impossible to steal, and costs an arm and a leg (like silverfast).
each software would take quite a bit to learn, small parameter adjustments could impact final output, i would definetly recomend settling with a particular scanning software, learning its pros/cons before going off scanning whole batches, otherwise you might desire to re-scan some thing mid way through!
3. input, always scan at native DPI, if the scanner is labeled as a 12000 dpi scanner, you scan at that setting (even though the reality is that the output is not really 12000 dpi.... )
4. output, i pretty much output at the maximum, full bit depth, full specturm, no compression, etc. The 4000 DPI scan my scanner makes, is a 130 MB tiff, which then process like any other photo using lightroom, i do not let scanning software do the jpeg conversion, much like i dont trust my digital camera to do the jpeg conversion for me.
overall its a tedious process, good luck.