Re: Scanning Negatives - Advice Needed

I completely agree with the tips and recommendations the other guys have made.

I was a technical writer and technical publications manager in Hewlett-Packard's digital imaging group for 8 years. I wrote manuals for HP ScanJet scanners, and HP Photosmart film scanner. I wrote two books on scanning for Random House and Prentice Hall. Do nor think about getting the books, they were out of date many years ago.

I have a Nikon Coolscan 9000 film scanner and an EPSON V700 desktop scanner. Also use a VuPoint Magic Wand hand scanner for scanning documents when traveling. I wish Nikon still made scanners as I think the 9000 was the best. Nikon stopped supporting them and their software is really out of date. I use VueScan with the Nikon and the EPSON. I have scanned hundreds of negs and slides with the Nikon and hundreds of prints with the EPSON. I have used the EPSON to scan 4x5 land 8x10 negatives.

I highly recommend scanning at the highest resolution possible as you never know what you might want to do with the images in the future. Also editing the scans to remove dust spots, scratches, etc.is much better and easier with high res files. Never scan an image as a JPEG. Scan as TIFF or Photoshop. A good friend at HP was on the industry working group that developed the JPEG and TIFF formats. JPEG was for web images. It has been improved since it was developed, but is still limited in image quality compared to TIFF. Most publications use TIFF files. All the images in my K-36 book were TIFF files scanned with the Nikon or EPSON.

I recently found a box of exposed film from 1981. I got misplaced in a move and I thought it was lost. Had the film processed and am scanning the Illford FP4 film with the Nikon 9000. Last image is one of the scans.









Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2021 08:50PM by Jerry474.