Originally Posted by
Chester McCheeserton
I'm sure we've all got our own workflows dialed in to what feels right. I scan my 5x7s on a drum at either 4000 or 3200, never done tests side by side to see if one really outdoes the other, I doubt it, at least on Portra, but sometimes 4000 makes me feel better.
I save the raw scan as an 8 bit tiff. But I do switch to 16 bit when I'm compositing together multiple negatives or multiple scans done at different apertures, (which I do quite frequently). Using the big soft paint brush to mask full size files together can make banding in skies if done in 8 bit.
and a handy trick someone showed me once is that you can get nearly all of the benefit of working in 16bit (with the exception of big soft brush moves just mentioned) just by working in 8bit, and only switching to 16 bit at the very end right before you flatten the layers, then switching back to 8. (although I'm sure lots of folks just never flatten) But I , like Steven, do frequently bump up over 10 gigs on the initial compositing in 16 bit.
Save em as PSB's, run the scratch to a giant empty external, rolling my mid 2012 macbook pro with 16 gigs of ram and a big internal SSD seems to work okay. Sometimes by the end I've got 15- 20 adjustment layers mostly burning and dodging curves and levels and hue/sat. But if you can do it with fewer layers and the print looks good, certainly that's all that counts.
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