scanning with dslr?

[Darin Boville]

>>VueScan does a very nice job. Perhaps a stitched file could be created that VueScan would consider a "raw" file, and then process as if it had been created by the scanner.<<

I haven't tried it yet but this seems possible with Vuescan. I just checked and it has a "Source: File" option and the little tool tip that comes up says you can use TIFF, jpg, or RAW files.

On a related note, I went to upgrade/buy the new version of Vuescan the other day--mine was very old--and it turns out that Hamrick is giving a free upgrade to *all* prior owners to the new version. Very cool, very nice. There's even a serial number look-up capability on the web site if you've lost yours.

http://www.hamrick.com/#anniversary

--Darin

[Ben Syverson]

Ed Hamrick is amazing. I bought the "Professional" version a while back, because it's great to know you get free upgrades for life. Great business model.

[Darin Boville]

Ed Hamrick is amazing. I bought the "Professional" version a while back, because it's great to know you get free upgrades for life. Great business model.

I don't know if you get upgrades for life--in my case it was a 10th anniversary sort of thing.

--Darin

[Ben Syverson]

If you buy the "Professional" edition ($79), upgrades are free forever. It's awesome!

[Mick Noordewier]

To me this would be the make or break issue for "scanning" color neg with a DSLR. It is just too difficult and time-consuming to color correct manually. Hamrick's s/w has a very good set of profiles, and can evidently read the "raw" (uninverted) DSLR images.

As others pointed out, this is not an issue for color pos or b&w.

[Nathan Potter]

There is the Gigapan robot for around $300.00 that might be adapted for the precise scanning purpose. The technique, as pointed out here, on 27 Sept 2007 by Q.T. Luong, "Gigapixel images go mainstream", involves a robot stepper that holds a high res DSLR, for example. The robot automatically scans up to some 300 frames of the subject then software with pattern recognition stitches them together yielding up to a Gigapixel mosaic. It may be that the images are collected by moving the angle of view, which could mean a distortion problem for a small flat transparency with a macro lens. But hey, we're just trying to invent something here which ultimately might have some merit. Is this an approach to the next high resolution scanner? It seems some of the elements are already available as mechanical and optical subsystems. And there are numerous versions of stitching software around. Good project for one of us with nothing to do!

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[Ben Syverson]

I've been beta testing the gigapan robot... It's great, but I'm not sure it's the best solution for this problem. Because you're rotating the lens to capture the subject, you wind up with a naturally spherical image. To make it square (rectilinear), you need to distort the image quite a bit.