more on digitising photos

[John Bowden]

I passed on Mike Walsh's queries about digitizing photos to Bob Cooper here
at ANU who has the job of building a digital photographic archive over the
next couple of years, and someone who has tons of experience and knowledge
in these things.

Here are his comments. He's not a subscriber to the list, so see me for any
clarification, further info...

Cheers
John

I assume Mike is talking about colour negs. It's important with colour negs
that a few procedures be followed to avoid or, at least, minimise some
inherent problems with colour negs in particular.
I would use the negatives in preference to the prints even though colour
negatives can be quite difficult to achieve a good result but it is worth
the trouble over prints. I scan colour negs at 2000dpi and scaled to 100%.
It's important not to use any form of sharpening or unsharp masking as this
can create a form of noise called 'grain aliasing'. If the scanner software
allows for colour and tone correction prior to scanning I would do that.
Otherwise scan directly into Photoshop (or similar) and do the corrections
in there before saving. I save the resulting scan as a TIFF file so that
further editing can take place without the degradation that occurs whenever
a JPEG file is edited then saved. The reulting file size is in the order of
14mb and is more than suitable for enlarging digitally for printing if
required.
I would suggest purchasing  a dedicated film scanner such as a Microtek
ArtixScan 4000tf which comes with Silverfast AI scanning software which is
a superb product. Otherwise, a less expensive option might be one of the
Nikon film scanners. I don't have first-hand experience with them so I
can't suggest a particular model.
It's also advisable to have the monitor and scanner calibrated to ensure
that what you are looking at on the screen is what the file will produce
when output to a lab etc.
Hope this helps and I'm happy to go deeper if he needs to.
Cheers,
Bob