Brothers (and sisters?),

I recently purchased a Dimage Scan Elite II and started scanning my negs. One thing I'm noticing is that much of the detail my negs and prints have shown get lost in the scanning process and no amount of manipulation with Minolta's software or PhotoShop Elements gets me the kind of reproduction I'd like to see.

Any tips/suggestions/ideas?

-- Jay Bee (JBee193@aol.com), March 30, 2002

Answers

There are no easy answers (many different factors could be involved), but you could try Ed Hamrick's VueScan software. It works much better w/my Dimage Scan Dual than the Minolta PhotoShop plug-in.

-- Chris Chen (Wash., DC) (furcafe@NOSPAMcris.com), March 30, 2002.

If you haven't visited http:// www.scantips.com/, you should do so.

Just because you have a scanner and a good negative doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get perfect results without some learning time and effort. It's just like working in the darkroom...

-- Godfrey (ramarren@bayarea.net), March 30, 2002.

Godfrey is spot on with the advice about scanning being a new learning curve. Have you made sure you are scanning at the maximum resolution? Don't use any any dust removal options, this can lead to over processed images, especially from silver based negs, and can give softer edges to detail. If you have done these things and still can't get what you want I suggest learning about 'Unsharp Mask','Curves' and 'Levels' in Photoshop just to get you going.

-- Steve Barnett (barnet@globalnet.co.uk), March 31, 2002.

Scan your B&W negs in color 35mm. Then use channel mixer in PS. You'll get 3x the data in color that you do in B&W. That's the basic secret. Essentially, never scan in B&W mode.

-- Patrick (pg@patrickgarner.com), March 31, 2002.