Capture: Labour Weekend: Town or Country?
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David Hood, in reply to
What are you you using? Any tips?
What I happen to be using is an oldish (2005) Epsom Perfection 4870 (but that is only really because I happen to have access to it). It is a flatbed scanner with a light you can put on in the lid, so you can scan transparencies.
Because it has a little rack for putting eight slides in at a time, I am skipping the preview scans (since the slide is in the same place each time) as a time saver. Because of the number of slides I am not bothering to adjust the scanned area for portrait or landscape of the picture, I am just scanning in the square area of (more or less) the whole slide. It is a relatively easy job to write a computer script that crops the black frame of the slide at a later point in time (I've written a number of scripts like this in the past for different jobs).
I do know of custom slide scanning machines, but haven't used one so can't speak to them. Though I have heard from people whose opinion I trust that they can be a bit temperamental with different kind of frames so you often need to do a bit of bodging to get cardboard frames through a slide scanner optimised for plastic framed slides. I've got cardboard framed slides, several different kinds of plastic framed slides, so metal framed slides, and some that are actually just two bits of glass taped together.
I am scanning at 1200 dpi, as good enough for onscreen viewing, and saving them as a tiff (since jpg is lossy compression I wouldn't use it by preference for a job like this). However, I am putting aside all the important slides (mainly the family history ones) with the intention of doing a second pass of scanning these again at 3600 dpi (which is towards the upper end of the scanners abilities).
If I have got one really major tip, it is to get into the scanner settings if you can and turn of all correction. My reason for saying this that the scanners built in adjustments are intended to be good general purpose ones, but are not necessarily the absolutely best adjustments for a particular slide. Computer programs have gotten a lot better over time at fixing up pictures, and I expect that to improve. So I would rather be fixing up by hand a particular image from the original rather than one that has had (for example) automatically had a slight general blurring applied by the scanner to small dots of different colour to their surroundings to get rid of dust specks. I trust my skills in this more than the scanner's, and expect the tools to do this to get better and easier to use over time.
Because I don't have a lot of contextual information, I am scanning the slides into folders named with any identifying comments from the slide box (for those that were in boxes). Later on, I really mean to get around to looking at options for easily applying keywords to the picture metadata so that they become part of the picture file.
About the only other thing I can think of to do with scanning (rather than for example the techniques for fixing up the picture files) as I write this (having scanned another 32 slides) is to make sure the scanner stays clean. I am doing a quick wipe with a soft cloth now and then to remove the transfer dust etc from all the slides being put on and taken off. -
David Hood, in reply to
The view is out over the Christchurch estuary and Pegasus Bay.
That is a lovely baroque cloudscape
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Sofie Bribiesca, in reply to
Guess I better post some pickles. Is that to your Mum's?
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Islander, in reply to
Hey! No response necessary - me & my Mum just loved the last parcel! (She got the bright one, I got the white one, and all was very well! And, yep, I'll be there-)
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