Kaj Haulrich wrote:
On Wednesday 16 June 2004 11:42, John Richard Smith wrote:
Kaj Haulrich wrote:
On Wednesday 16 June 2004 01:15, John Richard Smith wrote:
Kaj Haulrich wrote:Thanks a lot, John. That was exactly the answer I had hoped for.
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
I surfed the web and found almost nothing about film scanning
for Linux, and was very confused about flatbed vs. film
scanners.
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.
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
Thanks again, John. I've ordered an Epson 2400 Photo, will arrive in a fortnight. Like you, I have mostly 135mm films in B/W negatives, but a variety of other, older formats as well. It is a great comfort to me, that you tell me I can scan them on this device.
The problem is those old negatives on glass plates. I've managed to copy them to 135 mm film by means of one of those bellow-style adapters to my Nikon, but it is a time-consuming task, what with all those lenses, adjustments and heavy gear. But it is worth the effort.
I can't wait to get going with my new scanner. I reckon it it's just plug 'n play, right ?
Regards
Kaj Haulrich.
Epson is a good choice.
The device has it's own independent powers supply so no big drain on PSU, and the motor is 24volt , very important for speed of scan and reliability, you really need a usb port too, it will work on parrallel but it's slow, and it's a USB2 device, so if your mobo doesn't have usb2 I'd advise getting a usb2 pci card as well. None of this is absolutely important but you know scanning involves very big files at times.
When you fit the negative holder in it's place, it uses a backlight in the lid that illuminates the neg. Otherwise use the scanner in the obvious way for pics. Incidentally , you will find that negatives loose their intergrity faster than pics over the years, so a good quality picture is a better source to scan than a negative, now I bet you wouldn't of expected that, I didn't, but it's true, especially coloured negs.
The glass plate negs will( I expect, not absolutely sure, since glass negs are rare) be a tad larger than the backlight in the lid , if so you may have to experiment with your own light source somehow. But otherwise I don't see that they will be a problem. The backlight is made to fit nicely the neg holder. Sane did a superb job of all that was asked of it and gimp adds that little bit of correction to the original image, you know , maybe the picture was a little dark, if so you can lighten it with gimp. There are so many things you can do with gimp that I haven't yet learned, but quite simple things like adding text to the original picture so that a permanent record of the date time place etc gets added. I think it's all brilliant . Decades from now when we are all pushing up daisies some future generation will thank you no end for that little bit of time and trouble you took creating these valuable images.
Sane stores images in .pnm which is just fine.
However .pnm is a linux format(is that the right word)
Windblows has it's own picture formats
When doing things for posterity one has to be realistic.
What will be the format that some future generation will want to convert from to whatever they will then be using ?
Good question.
I elected to store images in .pnm and .jpg to hedge my bets.
You must make your own choices.
Gimp does the conversion on the trot so no problems there.
Undoubtedly .pnm is the best storage format for retention of detail of the original image, but that means large files, you get nothing for nothing.
Quite a lot of my old pictures were snaps , not particularly high quality images and I elected to group them all together per roll film collection and convert them to .jpg. I suppose some might of been worth a .pnm file but there you are. Otherwise the better the quality of image , by that I mean grain detail, the more likely I am to use .pnm and .jpg together and store both, but obviously the picture has to warrant it.
Good luck.
John
--
John Richard Smith
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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