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Rossie
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 Posted -
11/01/2008
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19:30
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Because of the grim weather, I have been unable to experiment outside with my shiny new camera, so I have resorted to indoor efforts, using flash and focus................
Gill
Kalh mera oi filoi mou
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Callunna
Revolving Grey Blob
3044 Posts
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Posted - 14/02/2008 : 13:32
"I'm sure the graphic designers on here will be able to explain it better if I'm not making sense."
I gave up trying to explain the best way to handle digital images a while ago. Folks have their own methods - so be it. No skin off my nose.
I'm only a graphic designer handling digital images every working day (she meowed...) |
softsuvner
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Posted - 14/02/2008 : 13:51
Nolic
Good to see someone with a painter's eye looking at photos. Photography and painting have so much in common. The painter tries to overcome huge technical problems to produce an image of what is in his or her mind's eye. The photographer tries to produce what his or her mind sees through the eye or the viewfinder - this is too often not what comes out on the screen or the print.
A lot of the great landscape photographers say that they form the photo in their mind before they even take the camera out of its box.
The problem with photographing hills is the viewpoint that you need to emphasise their size. When a photo is taken on such a clear day as the Pendle one, you also lose the sense of distance ( isn't this what artists call aeriel perspective?). A professionel photographer would remedy this with filters.
What we are all trying to develop is an "eye" for the picture (blow all those fancy rules for composition). The digital snapper has the advantage that he or she can see the results almost at once!
Malcolm
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Tizer
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Posted - 16/02/2008 : 12:49
I've been scanning at different settings to try and learn more and find out for myself what gives the best result when converting 35mm colour slides to JPG images. I'm a complete amateur and relate my experiences here simply in case it might help others out there who are as new to scanning photos as I am. So apologies to those who have more experience and knowledge (look away now!)
I'm using the software that came with my scanner to do the settings. It offers resolutions from 72 to 2400dpi in a dropdown box. There is a box in which to set output dimensions and you can use inches, cm, points or pixels. It was on cm so I left it there. I'd no idea what settings to use but dabbled about with various combinations until I found that 600dpi resolution combined with 10cm output width a good result. This equated to 2362 pixels width. I could use 300 @ 20cm, 1200 @ 5cm and 2400 @ 2.5cm and got similar quality results - these all being 2362 pixels. Now this might have been obvious to you, but it wasn't to me until I found out by experiment!
But what I find odd is that scanning the slide at, say, 600 @ 20cm (about 4800 pixels) didn't give me a better photo. In my simple mind the more pixels I use, the better quality picture I should get. Is this because the quality of the slide must be limiting perhaps?
Another odd thing (odd to me!) is that the file size of the 600 @ 10cm scan is about 400KB whereas a digital camera photo with about the same pixel size is a much bigger file (I think it was about 1000KB).
As a separate experiment I dabbled with the Unsharpen Mask and did get better, sharper images but the blocks of dark colour now have speckles of other colours in them. More experimenting needed!
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softsuvner
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Posted - 17/02/2008 : 20:51
Tizer
I must admit the whole scanning thing seems a matter of finding the settings that suit you and sticking with them!
As an experiment, I had a go with the slide template on my new scanner (an Epson 4490 Photo - now out of production!). It took a bit of playing to find my way around and, as usual, life is too short if you use the "help" facility.
My Nikon scanner scans at some ridiculous dpi, so I set this one at 4800. I've never bothered with the output size on my previous scanners, so left this one on the default setting. The only other thing that phased me was "image size" option which has to be set, I settled for "original image" setting.
As wtih my previous flatbed, you can do a preview and set the marqee tool (the dotted line thing) to limit the area scanned (this one scans the edge of the slide as well if you don't).
Overall not a bad result, but one that can be improved in post-scan processing. I will post a couple of scans so you can make your mind up. Personally, I can't find anything better than post-scan process in Photshop Elemenst and, if you fancy trying it, I have an unused, legit copy of Elements 3 (not the most up to date - but still pretty dam good) that was packaged with the scanner. All the family already have Photoshop (don't ask how) so you can have it for the cost of postage of the disc. Contact me via my profile if you are interested.
Malcolm
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 18/02/2008 : 07:43
he3 one basic thing that I am sure of with scanning is that the bigger the original file in mb, never mind the individual settings, the better the result you can get when using the pic in Pshop. A 35mm neg scammed in grayscale to give a file size of about 4mb is good enough for just about anything you ever want to do. In colour it's about twice the size. I am doing all mine at 1600dpi. Standard setting on the Canon scanner is 1200.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Big Kev
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Posted - 18/02/2008 : 07:56
It all depends on what you're going to do with it.
If, for example, you intend to produce a print from it I would use filesize as a rule of thumb. A required print size of 20" x 16" at 200dpi is about 40MB, I would set the scanner to give me a similar filesize......
Big Kev
It doesn't matter who you vote for, you always end up with the government. |
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 18/02/2008 : 09:03
You're right Kev. My attitude towards digitising the neg files is that what I needed was useable files for anything but very specialised purposes. The scanned negs are all identified and so if you wanted a better image you could always go back to the negative and extract any definition you wanted. In terms of the image impact, it's not the definition that hits home, it's the quality of the image. In the old days people used to witter on about grain size. OK, a 10X8 field camera with fine grain fim gave stunning definition but how many of those images are icons? Look at Philip Jones Griffith's Vietnam pcs (Vietnam Inc is the book if you can find one), grainy, blurred and badly processed but stunning images. Look at Capra's pics of the D-Day invasion, all ruined by a technician who overheated the negs to get them to the editor quickly. Only a couple survived, one of the soldier in the water and one through the landing craft doors of the small cafe and the beach. Both icons. So my advice is to stop worrying too much about definition and concentrate on the subject and composition. A good pic transcends the medium......
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Tizer
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Posted - 18/02/2008 : 11:33
Malcolm - I'll post one of my scanned slides for interest too. I agree with your comment: "life is too short if you use the "help" facility"! Thanks for the offer of software but I have enough - I'm doing these scans on an old Win98 PC and that has Pagemaker which included a version of Photoshop. Also, I can transfer the files to my Linux PC and then open them in The Gimp for editing. That software is very powerful - far more than I need really.
Kev - I agree - "It all depends on what you're going to do with it." I'm going to view on screen, not print photos. But for most of my pics I want crisp detail because they are recording images rather being artistic. Also I want to avoid very large file size if possible because the big multi-meg files can be a pig to open and handle.
Stanley - I agree with what you say about the quality of the image but, as explained above, I'm looking for crisp images and to view on-screen.
From my recent experience with the 35mm files I found that scanning to 2400 pixels width was the optimum for viewing on my PC Any greater than that and it gave me a bigger file but no better image resolution. I'm guessing this must be because the slide has nothing more to offer (they were probably from Kodachrome 64 film).
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softsuvner
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Posted - 18/02/2008 : 22:23
Tizer
Looks like you have the right equipment for the job. Kev and Stanley are right of course, the scan setting is determined by what you intend to do with the result. In my case I started with a computer to print from slides, and the big file habit dies hard.
Stanley is right that a good picture transcends the mediium, but of course, like me, you seem to be looking chiefly for good record shots.
I disagree with Stanley's assertion that the old "landscape" format field cameras produced few iconic shots, they did but most people don't know or remember the Crimean War shots of Roger Fenton or the US Civil War shots of Mathew Brady. Photojournalism didn't start with the Robert Capa generation and the invention of the Leica. For instance, many shots that are still iconic today were taken on the huge old Speed Graphic camera that are familiar from old films.
Anyway, I had a go at scanning a slide with my flat bed scanner, and didn't touch it with Photoshop (apart from resizing for OGFB). I picked the slide from my unsorted box, it was the first one with even lighting that I came across.
If I had allowed myself to Photoshop it, I would have warmed the colour slightly and given a slight further sharpening, but on the whole its not too bad for my purpose.
To show what can be done with post scanning , I have added these two. The slide is a 30 year old Kodakchrome, I have scanned it without any fancy manipulation. It shows the problem that we have with slides, they are meant to be projected with a powerful light, and this is not straightforward to reproduce when we copy it.
I've had the scan in a Picture File for sometime, this is a fairly hurried attempt to improve it in Photoshop. I felt I could have done better with more time and skill, the compromise was in trying to keep the detail that shows outside the windows but keep the detail in the hadowed part.
People could argue that it is a form of cheating. My reply would be that I am only doing what has always been done in the darkroom and importantly, the most expensive image software available cannot put in detail that was not in the original picture.
Malcolm
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 19/02/2008 : 07:01
Dee Mill?
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Tizer
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Posted - 19/02/2008 : 14:00
Malcolm, thanks for posting the example pictures. It's interesting to see the good resolution with the tank engine and what you can do with the mill pictures.
When I first scanned slides the results lacked detail so I started projecting them onto a white screen at about a metre distance and photographing them with my digital camera from a tripod behind the projector. It gave a slightly better result and was faster.
I've posted two pictures below which are from slides. The first was done by the projection method and I posted it some weeks ago on the Winged Heroes thread. The resulting photo was cropped to about half its original size to emphasise the German aircraft. Now I've scanned the same slide using the settings described above, then put the JPG image through the Unsharpen Mask filter. The result is shown in the second photo. The second image was sharper even without the filter but had better detail after it, as shown here.
The colour is strange though - the second image is very blue and it was like this before the Unsharp filter. So it is something to do with the scanning.
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softsuvner
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Posted - 19/02/2008 : 21:18
Stanley
Yep, its the Dee again. I did a Photoshop job on the scan some time ago for my own pleasure but, as the film people would say, I "blew" the windows, obliterated the details in the highlights.
It wasn't until I had a second go the other day, that I realised what I could get of the world outside the engine house, I had forgotten how near the next mill was ( The Dawn Mill?).
Just goes to show the value of keeping the originals safe, and that there is no "definative" copy of a photo.
Tizer
When you take a digicam shot of the projected image, you put the whole thing through another set of software (your digital camera) and introduce another extra set of variables.
If you have cropped 50% of the picture, then you are coming to the limits of the resolution of the original image, especially, (in my experience) if it was taken with a zoom or telephoto lens.
You should be able to do something with the blue colour cast with your post-scan software. In my experience, digital images often need a little warming up.
Malcolm
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 20/02/2008 : 08:11
Used to have the same problem with Ektachrome, very cold and blue in low light. Kodachrome used to pick up a green cast if you were in a building with old glass in the windows. Biggest problem in those days was colour casts introduced in the processing. Once, when I was in California, the technician at the local college was installing a new colour line for trannies so he gave me about 40 rolls of film to shoot so he could use them as test films. Wonderful variation of colour casts all shot in brilliant sunshine with the old Nikons. Camera, fim and exposure were all spot on. It was quite clearly the processing.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
gearce
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Posted - 19/08/2009 : 11:02
Ever wondered? ...... Now you know
LANG MEY YER LUM REEK
There are hundreds of languages in the world, but a smile speaks them all  |
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 19/08/2009 : 16:53
Didn't need to wonder, served with the Black Watch in Berlin.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Some photos
