digital archive questions 1,2,3

[yuexiachou29]

Hi

I am digitalizing my negs, a few questions popped up during the archiving process

1. how many various sizes of scan do you have? i.e. low res, high res?

2. what are the resolutions you scan?

3. software use to input details? lightroom? bridge?

would love to know your workflow.
thanks for sharing

[biedron]

I shoot transparencies exclusively, but most of this should apply to negatives as well. I am definitely in the "scan once" camp. Spotting is way too tedious to do it more than once. So I scan at the highest optical resolution of my scanner (Epson V700), around 2000dpi, and that is the resolution I work with down the line. I scan with the Epson software, and then import into Lightroom to make adjustments.

Bob

[polyglot]

1) scan once, the best you can.
2) for me, 2500dpi for 4x5", but it will depend on your hardware.
3) VueScan, exiftool, and an external (SQL) database of content tags.

[bob carnie]

plus one on the scan once best you can.



1) scan once, the best you can.
2) for me, 2500dpi for 4x5", but it will depend on your hardware.
3) VueScan, exiftool, and an external (SQL) database of content tags.

[Jim Jones]

I agree with the others: scan, edit, and archive at high resolution. Then you can downsize, crop, and sharpen at whatever size is needed to post or print. Save those downsized files for any possible future use.

[Preston]

I am in the 'scan once' camp, too.

**Scans are done at 1800 dpi (the max for my Microtek and Vuescan)
**I create a 'Master File' that is edited in Photoshop. This file is never sharpened.
**Files for print and/or the Web are created from the 'master file'.
**I use an image management program to manipulate the metadata.
**All files are backed up to external drives.

--P

[Kirk Gittings]

plus one on the scan once best you can.

ditto

[paulr]

Agreed on all this. But realize that the day may come a when a new technology will convince you to scan again.

I keep:
1) the raw scan file (mine aren't truly raw files, but they're loosely cropped, and include all the detail and tonal information the scanner's can capture)
2) the layered "master file" on which I've done all adjustments that aren't size-dependent
3) purpose specific files, for any print or screen use. These are reduced (or occasionally enlarged) to final size, sharpened appropriately, and in some cases color-corrected based on soft proofing.

I use Lightroom to manage digitally captured images. I manage scans manually. With scans, I'm dealing with numbers that are just in the hundreds. If I did a high volume of film work, I'd probably use a lightroom-like solution.

[yuexiachou29]

thank you for sharing folks.

how large is your file per image?

[koraks]

300mb for 4x5 b&w tiff, 1gb for color. I scan at 3200dpi and resize and optionally sharpen for the output I aim at. When printing, I don't resize, just crop. I let the print driver handle any resampling; it's perfectly capable I find.

[mdarnton]

Scan once, according to my projected real need, plus some for safety. I only print to 11x14, and my printer handles 13x19, though I never print that large. Once in a while I might make something larger for fun, but I'm not impressed by large prints, so I don't need a lot of res. Most of my film these days is 8x10, with a tiny amount of 5x7 and even less 4x5.

I scan once, at 1200, which will let me make a pretty big print if I want. Then I do all the processing I can in Photoshop layers, leaving the original untouched underneath, and save as a layered TIFF. I have been saving the final file in the cloud, on two different services, and make a jpg at full resolution for Flickr, as a last-shot backup. The cloud files are mirrored on all of the three computers I regularly use. Every once in a while I archive on a hard drive, but I don't trust that. I don't trust DVDs or CDs, having been burned by those in the past (I've been using digital since around 1998 or before, and lost most of that early stuff). I'm more concerned with the backup than the scanning res. That's the reason for TIFFs, too, though that seems to be a contentious issue.* Of course, the original negs will probably always be there.

*[contentious: you bet, there are people who will vehemently disagree with everything everyone else says, and I no long play that game with them. You know who you are; most of you are on my ignore list here, so I won't be seeing your response. Couldn't resist saying that :-) . . .Just saying what I do.....]

[biedron]

thank you for sharing folks.

how large is your file per image?

About 600Mb for a 2000dpi 4x5 scan (color)