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12/17/2010 09:11:49 PM · #1 |
i got a bunch of medium format negatives from my wedding scanned. I was told i should get very high res scans and the are 400 dpi, but they still seem soft and not crisp like my proofs.
Today i picked them up and i am extremely disappointed with the results. 10-12 or so of them came in a resolution of 600px or so by 600px or so. yeah, seriously... all the others are 4000x4000. some of the pics came out great, other no so with a bunch of bright gold colored squiggly things, i cant tell if its negative defects or not but none of these things are on my proofs, could it be dust.
it turns out the shop i gave them to outsourced them. i called them up and they are going to rescan them themselves.
also they are jpeg. i was expecting tiffs.
what size should i expect or what should i tell them i expect when they get rescanned?
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12/17/2010 09:17:41 PM · #2 |
I can't answer your question, but for about $100-150 you can get a flatbed scanner with a negative scanner in it, so you can do the job right yourself. I have an Epson v300 and it does a great job. I think I found mine on sale for about $70.
Message edited by author 2010-12-17 21:18:39.
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12/18/2010 11:20:42 AM · #3 |
400 DPI is not near enough to capture the detail present in color positive (or negative) film. Some folks will tell yoiu you need a 4000dpi drum scan to get all the information... that's overkill for almost anything except for very fine-grained B&W films. Another aspect is the Dmax of the scanner, which affects the ability to scan very dense areas of the film. A Dmax of 4.2 will give you the ability to scan almost anything, but most flatbeds are more like 3.6 or less, which doesn't sound like a lot less, but it is; density is logarithmic. You can compensate for lower Dmax by doing multiple scans. Some software, Vuescan for instance, will allow you to do multi-pass scanning on scanners that don't normally support it.
Finally, dust and scratch correction using an infrared channel is another advantage of film scanners. Some flatbeds can also do this, but you need software that is capable of supporting it, and again Vuescan is one package that can do so.
ETA, for 35mm color film I normally scan at around 2000dpi. This will capture detail up to about 40 line pairs per mm, adequate for most color films, but not for some high-resolution B&W stocks.
Message edited by author 2010-12-18 11:23:16. |
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12/18/2010 11:33:03 AM · #4 |
Is it possible they scanned at a higher resolution and then resized and saved at 400dpi?
I use Vuescan with a flatbed scanner to scan medium format negatives, 3000dpi as a DNG or TIFF. The files are huge. |
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12/18/2010 11:47:15 AM · #5 |
| I recently had a color negative scanned at a highly respected photo shop. The file was ginormous but the quality of the image was really mediocre. VERY noisy and totally unusable. I tried salvaging it in PS but it was just way too poor. One of the best images I've ever taken, pre-digital. |
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12/18/2010 11:56:49 AM · #6 |
Originally posted by tanguera:
I recently had a color negative scanned at a highly respected photo shop. The file was ginormous but the quality of the image was really mediocre. VERY noisy and totally unusable. I tried salvaging it in PS but it was just way too poor. One of the best images I've ever taken, pre-digital. |
I'll guess that it was a relatively bright image, and so large areas of the negative were very dense. This is a big issue with negative scans; the dark (dense) areas of the negative are the bright areas of the positive. What this means is that the high-noise areas wind up in the highlights instead of the shadows. Can be pretty ugly.
Sounds like the folks who did the scanning did not take the time to do it properly. In cases like this, multi-pass scanning may be required to reduce noise in the dense areas.
Digital has also given us unrealistic expectations. Scanned film viewed at high magnification will be quite grainy; even low-speed film. This isn't a scan problem, but the inherent "noise" in the film. |
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