Always take time to clean before you start a scanning session. The cleaner may get into the body of the scanner if it hits the edge of the platen and compressed air can cause hard bits of dirt to scratch your glass.
Do not spray cleaner directly onto the glass or use compressed air. When scanning, dust is your enemy especially when scanning 35mm negatives! I clean my glass with pre-moistened lens wipes and follow up with a microfiber cloth.
First on the agenda, clean you scanner’s platen glass.
#Vuescan ice software#
Now turn on your scanner, fire up your scanning software and get ready to scan. Spend some time with your software of choice to know where the different settings are located. I will be showing screens from Epson’s Epson Scan for illustrative purposes. Optimum scan settings will be similar regardless of the application you choose to use. Moving on, I will try to be as software agnostic as possible. Each has demo versions for you to try out, so grab them and find the one that suits you best.
#Vuescan ice plus#
I personally recommend VueScan for a Lightroom workflow, as you can output your scans directly to DNG files, which is a big plus in a Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw workflow. Both of these pieces of software offer expanded scanning capabilities. The two I will recommend you trying out are LaserSoft Imaging’s SilverFast and Hamrick’s VueScan. While any of these packed-in applications will work well, you may want to consider using third party scanning software. Nikon and Canon scanners come with their own software as well. The Epson comes with its own custom application Epson Scan. Your first challenge you will encounter is which scanning software you will use. If you are in the market for a quality scanner, I whole-heartedly recommend the Epson V500. If you have another scanner, everything will still be applicable to your process, just dig a bit to find out your scanners specific capabilities. Claiming a 6400 by 9600 resolution and 48-bit color depth, it makes some strong promises, and delivers in general.ĭue to the Epson’s affordable nature and reasonable quality, I will be utilizing it as my example scanner throughout this series. For an average price of around $200 USD, the V500 offers great scanning at an incredible value.
#Vuescan ice archive#
In recent years, flatbed scanning technology has been closing the quality gap, especially with Epson’s offerings of the V500 and V750.Įpson’s V500 is of particular interest to casual film shooters and those wishing to archive their catalog of negatives. Throughout the years, dedicated film scanners have been far ahead in quality over flatbed scanners when it comes to scanning transparent media. Traditionally, if you were scanning slides or negatives you would want a dedicated film scanner, such as the Nikon Super Coolscan 9000 ED, which produces stellar scans at a resolution of 4000 DPI for the astronomical price tag of over $1000 dollars USD. There are two basic types of photo scanners, flatbed and dedicated. Today let’s take a brief journey into the world of scanning, with the goal of making the best possible scan for manipulation in Lightroom.įirst, let’s consider a scanner. You should, however, take a look at what software you plan to edit these images in, and scan in your images with that in mind. Most people’s arguments for their method have merit, often erring on the side of disk space.
There is a great deal of debate on proper scanner settings, scan resolutions, bit-depth and so forth. Scanning, in fact, is an art but it is only arcane if you let it be.
Scanning images from prints, negatives and slides has taken on the air of an arcane art. Today let’s take a brief journey into the world of scanning, with the goal of making the best possible scan for manipulation in Lightroom. Whether your source material is a print, slide or a negative, you only have one option to make it a digital file, scanning.
#Vuescan ice full#
If you’re like me, you probably have a few shoe boxes full of old negatives from the days before digital.