Actually, I don’t. I love it. It’s great.

However, when you have to touch up 500+ black and whites, it gets old very, very, very fast.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been scanning in photos from our wedding. The photos were taken by Stephanie Cristalli, who does weddings in a photo-journalist style and is good with both color and black & whites. We hired her for I want to say 4 hours… maybe 5, and did roughly 50-50 color and black & white (although we had them printed in sepia).

The negatives (she returns the negatives… a must with any wedding photographer. The ones that want to keep the negatives and then sell you prints are a bit scammy IMHO) are in a number of these PrintFile polypropylene negative holders. Each slide holds one 36-print roll (6 strips of 6 frame negatives plus a seventh the leading bit of film that has a roll number on it). How many do we have? Color goes up to letter “O.” Quick, what number is O? …… 15. 15 rolls of 36 prints. However, that’s not too bad, as the Digital ICE on the Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 does most of what we want, and we can just take the JPEG that it makes.

On to black and whites… well, the last PrintFile is labelled BB. So quick… 28 - 15 is…. yes, 13. 13 rolls of black and white… and 13 * 36 is…. 468. Granted, some didn’t come out at all, so maybe we’re looking at 450 here. Oh, and the Digital ICE won’t remove the dust and scratches, and Stephanie used Kodak TMAX 100, TMAX 400, and TMAX 3200 film. That’s professional black & white film, but sadly when scanned in infrared to detect dust and scratches (as the Digital ICE does), the silver on the film causes the dark portions to come up as dust — so Digital ICE just turns all gray to dark-gray portions of the frame black. So, you have to scan the photo as a TIFF file (20M each), pop it into Photoshop, run an initial pass using a dust & scratch removal filter (I’m using Polaroid’s now unsupported Dust and Scratch Removal Plug-in for Photoshop, but it’s also available stand-alone), and then look to see what gaping dust holes (big white dots) or scratches (long white streaks) were missed. Then, select an area around them and apply a darker filter (I typically use the built-in Photoshop Dust and Scratches filter @ radius of 25). Then, save it… I made an Action (a macro) that saves files as both a Black and White as well as a Sepia JPEG.

For scanning, I’m mid-way through Roll X… so only Y, Z, AA, and BB to go. Yay! However, for running through Photoshop, I’m only through S… so I’m behind by 4 and a half letters from where I’m scanning. And while scanning is slow (about 2 hours for 6 frames), it’s automated. You set up the scan, and then go do something else, like write a blog post or find new RSS feeds to read. With touch-up work, it’s a lot of load the frame, clean it up, look for defects, fix them, then save. It’s fast enough that it requires your complete attention, but slow enough when running the image through the filters that it sucks up time.

Blarg. Luckily, AFAIK this is the only B&W film I have, so I doubt I’ll have this problem again. But it’s still takin’ freakin’ forever!

Oh - huge shout-out to my brother for having a friend who works at Adobe and getting me Photoshop CS (well, the entire Adobe Creative Suite) for Christmas on the ol’ employee discount. I think this is one of the most used Christmas presents in years! (Although surprisingly enough, the most used Christmas present I’ve ever received is a set of 4 Pyrex bowls that my folks got for both myself and my brother over a decade ago… they’ve held up great to constant use. Go figure!)

This entry was posted 3 years, 2 months ago on Thursday, June 16th, 2005 at 12:57 am and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.