ANTENNA MOBILE GAIN
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possible from a consumer-level scanner. A word of warning: Batch scanning still requires some babysitting. Slide mounts warp over the years, and bad mounts can lead to jams. Older Kodachrome mounts with the square corners can cause problems, but I’ve found the most trouble from mounts used by Fuji in the early 2000s — they are extremely thin and subject to warping. In general, when I load 60 slides into my Nikon scanner, it usually makes it through all 60 with no problems about half the time. You’ll find your success rate will increase with experience.
Making File Adjustments There are two schools of thought when it
comes to getting the best possible digital file out of a scan. One school subscribes to the theory that you should adjust the image using your scanning software so that you get the best possible raw scan. The other school says just get an adequate scan and then make all your adjustments in Photoshop or Lightroom, as they have more powerful tools and more precise control. If I was doing one slide at a time, I’d probably go with the second school of thought. But if you are batch scanning (like I am), then you really have no choice. Set up your software so it generates a decent raw scan for all your slides, then do most of the work in Photoshop or Lightroom.
Fight Dust and Dirt with Digital ICE
Even carefully stored slides will naturally accumulate dust and dirt for some reason (I think if you want to design the best vacuum
cleaner in world, it should incorporate slides in the filter), and there are two popular methods to best handle this. Some people (with far more patience than I have) clean each and every slide with brushes and canned air before loading in into the scanner. Of course, some dust spots will still be there no matter how carefully you clean the slides, so after the scan you go into Photoshop or Lightroom and manually remove each of the remaining dust spots. Then there’s Digital ICE and its equivalents. Digital ICE (Image Correction and Enhancement) is a technology developed by Kodak and licensed to some scanner manufacturers that removes dust spots by scanning the surface of the slide with an infrared channel; when it finds a bump of dust, the software removes the dust speck and fills in the area in much the same way as Photoshop’s clone tool. It is pretty effective. Neither VueScan nor Silverfast have licensed Digital ICE, so they have their own methods of removing dust using the scanner’s infrared light.
Some people swear that using in-scanner
dust removal causes the image to soften. My experience has been that I have never noticed any degradation in the image (perhaps it’s the visual equivalent of noise only dogs can hear). Still, if I turned off automatic dust removal I would never finish getting my slides scanned and processed, so I’ll trade the possibility of slight degradation in the scan (if it actually exists) for the hours and hours of time saved in processing.
What File Size? Most consumer scanners will let you scan
your files at 4,000 d.p.i. (with the Minolta Dimage 5400 being the prime exception), which means the typical scan will come out with an image that can be printed at about 20 inches across. A typical 35mm slide is an inch-and-a-half across in its two-inch mount; publication and printing work requires a minimum of 300 d.p.i. Thus, the math comes down to 4,000 d.p.i. divided by 300 d.p.i. times 1.5 inches, which yields 20 inches. You can also output TIFs with 16-bit
color, so your final scan can eat up almost 200 megabytes. My theory is most of what I’m scanning will never need to be blown up larger than ten inches and doesn’t require 16- bit color, so I have the scanner set to produce an image 3,000 pixels across (which yields a ten-inch image at 300 d.p.i.) with 8-bit color The resulting TIF scan comes out to about 20 megabytes. If I need an image larger than that, I’ll go back and rescan it. The 20
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RAILFAN.COM
The output screen in VueScan software (left) includes the destination folder (in this case on an external hard drive) and an output resolution of 300 d.p.i., the standard for publishing and printing. The scanner is working on slides from October 2000, thus the naming convention of 2000-10-0001+. The + tells the software to name each scan to the next available number in the series. The filter screen (right) shows the VueScan equivalent of Digital ICE is set to a medium setting to remove dust spots.
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