Scanner for 35mm slides and negatives

[Joe P]

Paul,

Apart from gross exposure errors, misfocusing and terrible composition it's hard to tell if a negative is worth scanning, so you may need to scan them all and sort on screen. With transparency film, however, I prefer to sort and pick the contenders for scanning by looking at the slides with a loupe on a light table.

Scanning is labour intensive, so anything you can do to minimize scanning time will make the task far easier and faster — and keep you from going bonkers.

Joe

 

[eternumviti]

It can be quicker to simply scan the whole strip of 5 or 6 frames than pre-scan, then select and scan the one of the 5/6 you want.

The problem is that vuescan holds your previous settings, so you will inevitably end up scanning frame 4 of the next strip, when you actually wanted 2 and 3!

There might be a way round that, but I haven't found it.

 

[Stunsworth]

I used to scan everything too.

In Vuescan you can enter the frame number you want to scan, so entering 2,3 will scan frames 2 and 3 on the strip.

 

[Joe P]

Slides tend to be mounted so they are easy sort and select before sticking them into the scanning thingamabob. But do whatever works for you.

Joe

 

[tuga]

I suggest that you buy a cheap light box or table and a loupe. This will help you sort out what's worth scanning.

Find a good slide scanner with dust and scratch removal and buy Vuescan Pro. Scan files as DNG.

I keep my files in a main folder with the location, divided into three sub-folders: Oxford > Oxford_RAW (scans or camera raw files) / Oxford_TIFF (edited files) / Oxford_JPEG (files resized for the web)

I name my camera files like this: 20180314_0001.RAF / 20180314_0001.TIF / 20180314_0001.JPG

The scans are stored in folders by year then a LOCATION main + sub folders or a LOOSE photos main + sub folders because I mainly made travel photographs and they are named as follows: IN03-0001.DNG /
IN03-0001.TIF / IN03-0001.JPG (IN for India, 03 for 2003)

 

[Stunsworth]

One thing to remember about dust/scratch removal is that it won’t work with traditional B&W films such as FP4, Tri-X etc. However I t will work with films such as XP2 which are based on the C41 process. Kodachrome can also be an issue, though Vuescan should be ok with them.

Dust/scratch removal will save you a large amount of time spotting the scans - something I had to do as I usually shot films that didn’t allow the automatic process.

 

[Derek Wright]

Re dust and scratch removal - try it out first before you push a lot of images through, I found that too high a removal rate caused the image to go soft. In some cases a Photoshop / Lightroom cleanup might get a better result.

 

[Yomanze]

With a Vuescan Professional licence you are able to use the software across PC Mac & Linux. When I dug out my old Nikon scanner even with the right SCSI card in a PC it was difficult to get going due to later versions of windows not really supporting SCSI. I had an ancient Adaptec SlimSCSI card for a laptop, put this in a very old Thinkpad T60 loaded Ubuntu and it worked perfectly.

Ah, SCSI, an old joke: System Can’t See It.

 

[eternumviti]

I find that my Vuescan software often loses its (UBS) connection with my Nikon Coolscan IVED, tends to involve a random amount of rebooting of both hardware and software to get it back.