Thank you digital photography

I used to shoot film. I have nearly 250,000 trannies in my library. Some are quite good. Most are not.

Trannies were selected and sent to publications that then scanned them. I knew nothing of retouching and retouching used to be expensive.

Then I went digital. I found that I had to learn a lot of new skills. Film became unwanted. I had to buy a good scanner in order to supply digital files of shots I had made on film.

I learned to clean up pictures. I call it "Mustardisation" in honour of you-know-who.

I have found that I can now "save" many pictures that were on trannies but were no good for whatever reason, thanks to the skills I have learned through digital photography.

I have attached an example of a trannie that was useless before I found out about the cloning tool!

As someone just said, I need never take another picture underwater. I have enough to last a life-time.

But I will!

Hi John

I too have thousands of slides, a Nikon Coolscan 5000, Noise Ninja and Photoshop. However, when I look at my grainy scans they compare poorly with the clean files from even a D200. Maybe I am doing something wrong? What scanner and workflow do you use with your mountain of slides to get acceptable results?

Hi John

I too have thousands of slides, a Nikon Coolscan 5000, Noise Ninja and Photoshop. However, when I look at my grainy scans they compare poorly with the clean files from even a D200. Maybe I am doing something wrong? What scanner and workflow do you use with your mountain of slides to get acceptable results?

Hi Pete,

Nice to hear from you.

I don't attempt to scan a lot at one time. I just do each picture as I get asked. I can go to both my digital library and my film trannie library. As things get scanned and processed they move to the digital library but as I am mainly working for the same mag. they tend not to get used more than once. The difference is that I now do not reject pictures because of back-scatter and unfortunate intrusions like another diver's fin!

I find that the scanner will pick up the grain of the film if there is any to be seen. Can't do much about it if you used the wrong film or had it one-shot processed. The best scanner is an Ominicom Flextite. However, mine doesn't work with the latests Mac so I use an old one and transfer the scan over to the newer Mac with CS4 (soon to be CS5). The Coolscan 5000 should be good.

I just had an idea. I don't have any sharpening turned on for pics for repro. Sharpening will enhance the grain.

I share your experience. Since embarking on digital 2 years ago, I have been an advocate. Yes, I had to go through a whole learning experience - from pixel to color space to color profiling - but it has been an enriching and rewarding one. No, I am not big on PP - still believe in getting the basic right at the outset - but digital has made photography a more wholesome experience for me. The only negative I have is I have also the tendency to "shoot from the hip" because there is always the review and delete buttons.

I no longer scan slides. If I need one digitising I simply copy it and if I need a real high res copy, I copy it in two halves and stitch it - the results are still very good. Here's an example copied in two halves onto a 5D2 - grain is very evident! Its been cleaned up a fair bit and certainly looks better than it originally did.

Paul, I guess copying the slide with a camera is simply just another way of scanning it.

I forgot to mention my thanks to Paul Kay (pgk)for giving me straight answers in the early days of digital photography when there was a lot of people with reputations invested in incorrect information about it.

I have found that I can now "save" many pictures that were on trannies but were no good for whatever reason, thanks to the skills I have learned through digital photography.

Damn John, you mean I have to go back and look at those thousands of old slides and see what I can do with them now? I think I'll save that job for when I'm old and grey(er). You're right though. I'm finding I can improve stuff I shot just 2 years ago as I get better with processing.

Steve

Hi all,

I'm certainly not going to trawl back through them.....!

It is an interesting observation that the quality of our images is only as good as our software!!!!

Lightroom 3's noise reduction is amazing at adding a new lease of life to D2Xs images shot at a high ISO!

Adam

Someone helpfully suggested improvements to the colour of the shot exampled in a PM. You may not like the colour but did you spot the diver's fin that was shovelling sand through the water and giving me that finely speckled look, or the detritus that was drifting through the foreground? That was the point I am making. Shots on film that were rejected through unwanted intrusions can now often be cleaned up and saved. Wait 'till I get CS5!

Someone helpfully suggested improvements to the colour of the shot exampled in a PM. You may not like the colour but did you spot the diver's fin that was shovelling sand through the water and giving me that finely speckled look, or the detritus that was drifting through the foreground? That was the point I am making. Shots on film that were rejected through unwanted intrusions can now often be cleaned up and saved. Wait 'till I get CS5!

Hi John

I agree with a lot you have said. I started scanning my slides about 10 years ago with a Kodak slide scanner. Looking back the quality was awful, but at least I still have the slides. I currently use a Minolta Dimage 5400, which I am very happy with - except that since then were bought out there are no new drivers for Vista - so I scan on an old XP machine and transfer. This is no big hassle as there are lots of programmes that don't work with Vista, this is just another to add to the list.

One factor I see is that I have good images on slide from over a 20 year period. I am never going to get all those shots again. So if I can, slowly, scan them in and produce acceptable images alongside those of my current DSLR, then why not.

As Pete said earlier grain can be a problem. This can be reduced significantly in PS but bear in mind that most images are reproduced at less than 1000 pixels across. If you are seeing grain artifacts in your images at this resolution either the originaL images were shot on pretty high ISO film or there is a problem with your workflow.

It is true that many image libraries are no longer accepting 35mm scans (at max resolution you can always tell the diference) but it is also true that most publishers really don't care as long as the image is good enough at the required resolution.

Colin