Kaj Haulrich wrote:
On Wednesday 16 June 2004 01:15, John Richard Smith wrote:Most good flatbed scanners come with these film holders that take the negs in strips(they vary a bit, but the usual 6/8 neg strips that come back from the developers fit in nicely. Dead easy to use(remember, if like me you're part of a project, time is money)and stoy in the lid when not in use.
Kaj Haulrich wrote:
In my attic are thousands of old 24x36 mm negatives who never made it to the darkroom enlarger. Furthermore, to set up a darkroom nowadays is almost impossible - at least where I live. So : can anyone recommend a good film scanner that works with linux ? - What about image quality ? - Can SANE handle it ?
Experiences, please ?
Kaj Haulrich.
Sure, My epson 2400 photo will do all of that and sane has no problem scanning the individual images, and gimp can manipulate them well too.
So if the colours are a bit faded, don't worry too much gimp can add it back to a certain extent. Obviously if there is no red or yellow left in the image then it cannot do much, but provided the colours are still there in reduced levels they can be manipulated back to rude health again.
My scanner has a plastic film holder that the strips of negs are held in while scanning and sane can handle that easy. For some reason I cannot explain I found it better to scan Black and White photos/negs in colour mode and then convert them back to B/W in gimp the results seemed better. Probably I didn't have my setting right in the first place, I don't know.
I did a large project on 5,000 old family photos and wrote them all to disc afterwards for permanent record. That way the colours will not fade any more, and the space saving is quite something.Plus it's easy to replicate them and hand out copies all around the family for future generations, so that chances are some will survive into well beyond the present.
John
Thanks a lot, John. That was exactly the answer I had hoped for. I surfed the web and found almost nothing about film scanning for Linux, and was very confused about flatbed vs. film scanners.
Most of my old pics are B/W negatives on Kodak Tri-x and Ilford HP 3-5, so I intend to burn them to CD in a resolution about 800x600 and only print them occasionally. Will the quality be reasonable ?Oh that would be very good resolution, I set my scanner to scan ordinary "en" prints at 300dpi ( not an awful lot more use going higher since the grain of the negs is the determining factor, so film res of 200 is only capable of so much detail, but 400 I would up to 600dpi scan rate, but just play around and suit yourself.
However I have a few real old B/W oldies that date back to the beginning of the 20th century and created on large plate cameras of the day and the quality of the imagery is just sulperlative even after all this time , I take my hat of to those early photgraphic people they new quality when they saw it. I guess the difference is to do with the expense and affordability, since most people would of gone to a studio and paid good money for one off pictures in posed situations and they darn well expected good pictures. Anyway , whether negs of pics I just scanned them at the highest resolution I could get a file to fit on one 700MB disc, heck a disc cost 20p here in UK and I regarded the pics as being worth every penny.
If you have unusual sized negs you may have to fiddle with the carrier to get them in, or just place them flat on the scanner bed and heck, no matter if the scanned preview image is "wonky" just scale out the image area you want in sane and use gimp to correct or rotate it.
One word of warning, or rather preparation, Once started on just such a project the news gets out around the family, and pretty darn soon hundreds more pics start arriving out of the blue and soon what started with about 1000 to 1200 collection became a much larger project indeed. But I enjoyed it immensly and wouldn't of passed up the opportunity at all. Suddenly those old distance relatives known to you by name alone suddenly become real faces, people you can relate to.
regards,
John
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John Richard Smith
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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