Paul--
Well, I'm of the "scan once, use many" school of thought so I want to
pull the maximum amount of data off the film for one, awesome master
scan which I can then doctor up in different ways for different
future uses.
For Kodachrome this clearly requires that I scan with color
management off and afterwards assign my custom profile.
On the other hand the best out of the box solution (at least for
color slides) seems to be to scan at 14bits into the "Wide Gamut
(compensated)" color space. Oddly, the resulting file doesn't have
the "Wide Gamut" profile automatically assigned to it so you have to
manually do this in Photoshop.
In future I'll want to scan color and B/W negs and will have to
determine the best procedures at those times.
Your note on GEM is interesting. I forgot to mention in my tips that
I have found GEM set at level 3 (the default) to be an excellent
thing to do. (Level 2 did nothing in my particular test, and level
4, the max, resulted in too many patches where the algorithm merged
fine detail into a wash of flat color.) It has a quite salutory
effect on "noise" in the shadows whereas 4x or 16x multi-sampling do
virtually nothing; so maybe this is film grain rather than random
scanner noise. I have found that it sometimes takes data (such as
highlights on a tangle of jet black hair) and erroneously smooths it
out into a flat, dark brown, but these areas are only occasional and
very small whereas the benefits across the image far outweigh these
little spots of lessened detail. I've also found that GEM-processed
scans sharpen up beautifully, whereas with it off even modest
sharpening introduces a pronounced coarseness to the image.
--Bill
At 2:57 PM -0700 5-10-01, PAUL GRAHAM wrote:
>Bill
>thanks for your NS 3.1 advices,
>they are useful,
>
>so what do you suggest as a good everyday practise:
>wide gamut (compensated)
>or turning color management off?
>
>I use fuji negative film nearly all the time.
>
>please see my next post on highlight detail and GEM though - my 2 cents...
--
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Bill Fernandez * User Interface Architect * Bill Fernandez Design
(505) 346-3080 * bill@billfernandez.com *
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