Saving slide scans

[bobgreen]

I'm new here, and I may have missed a thread that covers the same ground, but here goes: I'm using a Nikon Coolscan V ED to do the proverbial treasured slides dating back to the 60s. Since I am terminally mathmatically challenged, reading tutorials on scanning resolution etc. simply confuses me more. What I'd like to do is save the scanned images to discs so I can print from them later, and/or make up slide shows. Do I need to save the images as really big TIFFs for printing and then resize them for slide shows, or can I reduce the TIFF size in the first place? Part two of the question would be, is there a scanning guide or tutorial out there that is written for those who aren't computer scientists (not that there's anything wrong with computer science or scientists)? Thanks.

[CJ Swartz]

One of the questions that only you can answer is how big will you want your finished product? Sometimes we don't know that someone will end up wanting an 8x12 print from an old slide; sometimes people know for sure that they won't want anything larger than 4x6's.

http://www.scantips.com/ has been on the net for years. A lot of folks, including me, started by reading it. I haven't actually read thru it lately, but it's a place to start.

One of a number of RetouchPro threads on the issue (with good info from MisterMonday and Kraellin and others) is here.

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/pho...ing+resolution

Feel free to ask any other questions -- we all started at the same place -- not knowing where to start.

[bobgreen]

Presently I can' t print larger than letter size (Canon i960), and I can't imagine going much larger than 11x14 (or the digital equivalent) from a commercial printer. And yes, I've been through Scantips a few times, that's what set off my howl of frustration in the first place. Even his calculator has digressions. ....and thank's for getting back.

[Jerryb]

hi,
I no expert on these thing and definitely not on photoshop, novice there however.. scanning i know a little bit, ...
1. first you may like this link... toward bottom there a table that you can use as guideline for scanning photographs... but it can be applied to negatives/films...in many situations... http://www.sublimationink.net/dh1.html
2. now film/negatives and photographs.. of course there a difference... with neg/slides the main reason you go for higher dpi/ppi settings is to get those sharper images off the negatives... now pro's will say at least 2000 and preferably 4000 but your photography places they routinely scan at 1200 (and have scans) and if my slides/neg are in good shape and clean, I have gotten real good scans at 600/800... but to me a lot depends on the quality of the neg/slides to begin with....
final note: that dpi/ppi ....setting will determine how many pixel hence the final size of the file...!

3. on the size of the file you don't have to use tiff... you can use png... it has good compression and it a non lossy format... remember even though jpg give you small files sizes... you lose quality whenever you save into that format...

4. now as far as slide shows.... now the one's i make... i never had to resize them.... the software always does it automatically for me... unless there a issue with aspect ratio of the picture versus the movie frame.. but generally just a little cropping take care of that...
5. as far as a scanning tutorial smile... there a lot out there.... most of them are general in nature.... I looked at several, trying to determine which one will work for you.... possibly knowing what direction/specifics you needed may have helped but anyway.. this one might work for you, if not smile... i tried.. http://photography.about.com/cs/adam.../Scan_Negs.htm

i hope my thoughts are useful for you.. good luck

Originally Posted by bobgreen

I'm new here, and I may have missed a thread that covers the same ground, but here goes: I'm using a Nikon Coolscan V ED to do the proverbial treasured slides dating back to the 60s. Since I am terminally mathmatically challenged, reading tutorials on scanning resolution etc. simply confuses me more. What I'd like to do is save the scanned images to discs so I can print from them later, and/or make up slide shows. Do I need to save the images as really big TIFFs for printing and then resize them for slide shows, or can I reduce the TIFF size in the first place? Part two of the question would be, is there a scanning guide or tutorial out there that is written for those who aren't computer scientists (not that there's anything wrong with computer science or scientists)? Thanks.

[mistermonday]

Hi Bob, and welcome to Retouch Pro!
Here are my 2 cents for what they are worth.
I also have treasured memories on slides from the same era. Most of the sixties slides were Kodachrome and Ektachrome. It is very probable that the emulsions have to some extent detiorated (some minimally, some significantly) depending on storage conditions. If you are lucky, they will be in pretty good shape but not as vibrant as the year in which they were taken. Many may have experienced color shift which will manifest itself with a mild to medium color cast. Restoring them may be as quick and easy as an Auto Color or Auto Levels in Photoshop. You may also need to tweak the saturation, straighten and crop, and perhaps add a little sharpening to bring back the original "POP".
My point is that you will likely need a bit of post-scan processing. In order to preserve as much of the detail as possible, and have the best data to work with you will want to scan more data than you need. You can always throw it away later. Here is how I scan slides with my Coolscan.

Scan your slides at 4000 DPI. The reasons are simple. Firstly the scanners head has that many sensor elements per inch so you might as well use tem. Secondly, if you plan to print 11 x 14, your image dimensions will really be 11 x 16.5 and you will need to crop it down - that's because the aspect ration of the slide is 1 x 1.5 inches. If you scan you image at 4000 dpi, your scan will be 4000 x 6000 pixels. At 300 ppi, you can print rouhly 13 x 20 without up sampling, so you have your 11 x 14 requirement easily covered.
My recommendation is to scan at 16 bit depth, and turn off all of the auto settings on the scanner - no descreen, no levels, no curves, no auto contrast, no autolevels, NO sharpening. Take a basic raw scan into PS or whatever program you edit with, and do all of you adjustments later.

Yes, this produces a huge file - roughly 144MB per scan uncompressed. Things you can do are:
Store this large file on DVD or Hard Drive. You can save as compressed TIF which will lower the file size to~60MB. If you want to get the size down further, you can do the essential edits, convert the file from 16 bit to 8 bit (which will halve the file size), then store as a compressed TIF or a jpg on setting 12 (which will be almost as large as the compressed tif. Personally I do not like compressed tifs as they slow the saving and opening process down. If the images are not that treasured, perhaps snap shots and are not unique, you can further down size.

All that being said, you can get buy with a image file that is only 2 MB. It really depends on what kind of quality and how large a print you plan to make at a later date.

In the end, remember that storage is relatively cheap and your slides will not last forever. For those memories which are truly priceless, you may want to err on the "too much data" instead of too little.

So here is a little side bar for you. I scanned several hundred slides a few years ago. I thought I did a great job, although some of the emulsions were high speed and the images had a lot of noticeable grain. I edited them and saved a low res version for 4 x 6 & 8 x 10 prints. However I archive the orig large file scans on a hard drive. Fast forward a few years and behold - you could get awesome noise filters like Noiseware and the editing tools in PS and PSP advanced tremendously. As good a job as I thought I did on the original edits, looked pitiful compared to the results I got with new tools and techniques. I was really happy that I had archived all those huge files. If the re-edits look as good to me in 5 years as they do today, despite where the technology may be, the I may feel secure enough to erase that old archive. But then who knows, in 5 years disk drives may hold a Frooglepoopillion Gigabytes.
Good luck with your project,
Regards, Murray

[bobgreen]

Thanks, cj, jerryb and mr monday. I think I'm going in the right direction. The tables at the sublimationink site are nice. As for old time mangy slides: digital ICE is nice plus what you can do in Photoshop. I was hoping for magic, but math will have to do.