Transferring slides into digital format and size

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GunRunner

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Hi

In the 1970's and 1980's I used a Russian Zenith SLR with a mixture of good quality lenses; this I sold a long time ago. I also collected many many slides that I have kept stored away, even with the projector. I have finally come back to this old hobby after a 20 year absence, and 6 months ago purchased a Canon EOS 400D with a 17-85mm lens (not the bundled one).

When I view the images (jpg) taken with this new 400D camera and lens in Photoshop SC2, typically I see the following image information.

Pixel Dimension 28.8M
Width 3888 pixels
Height 2592 pixels

Document size
Width 137.16 cm
Height 91.44 cm

Resolution 72 Pixels/inch

I have a CanoScan 8600F scanner and have started to scan in some of the many slides I have kept. Typically when I view these scanned images, I see in Photoshop SC2 the following image information.

Pixel Dimension 1.58M
Width 900 pixels
Height 614 pixels

Document size
Width 31.71 cm
Height 21.66 cm

Resolution 72 Pixels/inch

As you can see there is a vast difference between the image size taken with the new camera (large) and the image size from the scanned images of the old (very good quality) slides (small).

Now my question(s).

1. When I save these new slide images to my PC, do I change in Photoshop SC2 the scanned images size to be the same size as the new image size taken with the canon?

2. What ever the answer is, could you please advise why this would be neccessary or not?

3. Is there anything else I should do to these images whilst converting them across?

4. Are there any settings in the scanner that can be used to get the best results? I presume everything has already been done, and Photoshop SC2 is the way to carry out any enhancements. I am new to Photoshop anyway, so any tips would be useful.

Please note. I am viewing images on a Samsung SyncMaster 215TW monitor and have recently calibrated it using the Spyder2 sofware.

I will be most grateful if some knowledgeable person can help me with what might be obvious answers.

Thanks in anticipation.

Kind regards

Peter
 
The problem here isn't the physical size (Not until you print them back out again anyway) but the resolution. Your 400D is producing 3888x2592 pixel shots, whereas your scanner is only producing 900x614 pixel scans. the most likely cause of this is that you have the scanner set to screen quality (72dpi), whereas you should be scanning them at around 300dpi if possible (Or even higher). This will then produce much higher resolution images which can then be resized as you wish.
 
Thanks for the reply Messiah Khan

I am still a little bit confused by what you say. Isn't it all down to the optical resolution that the scanner works in?
Here is the link to the scanner..

http://www.canon.co.uk/For_Home/Pro...d_with_Film_Scanning/canoscan_8600f/index.asp

It says the optical resolution is 4800 x 9600 dpi!

When I look in Arcsoft PhotoStudio (I use this for scanning in the slides 4 at a time), the INPUT settings are as follows:

Advanced mode
Input settings
Color Positive Film
Colour

Output settings (is the list below and the settings the ones that I should be attending to?)

Output resolution
Choice of: 17 settings between 50 dpi and 9600 dpi.
and
Output size
Choice of:
Flexible or
Then choose from business card through to A3
Then choose from 9 settings from 128 pixels x128 pixels through to 2592 pixels x 1944 pixels.

If I use the flexible settings and an output resolution of 1200, it appears the images are around 5.1MB in size and not cropped.
 Is this the part that matters most for scanning in the most information so that the images can be manipulated in Photoshop CS2 at a later date, or should I be going to a higher output resolution?
Scanning settings
High Quality ON

So to recap as I understand please advise me on this...It is the output to the file that I save that matters the most as the optical resolution (quality of the scan) is already fixed at 4800 x 9600 dpi?

I need to get a grip of all this before I scan in around a 1000 slides.

Kind regards and thanks again in anticipation.

Peter
 
When scanning film, use the highest optical resolution your scanner offers, ignore any interpolated resolutions it offers, and save to uncompressed .TIF if possible. Avoid JPG like the plague for archive or printing work, use it only for the web.

Looking at your above post I think you should be choosing 9600 dpi, 2592 pixels x 1944 pixels. Try that and see what the results are, it's possible that you will end up with very large file sizes but that's good for archive purposes.

Do you have any Canon software for your scanner? it occurs to me that it might give you clearer options than Arcsoft.
 
Steep said:
When scanning film, use the highest optical resolution your scanner offers, ignore any interpolated resolutions it offers, and save to uncompressed .TIF if possible. Avoid JPG like the plague for archive or printing work, use it only for the web.

Looking at your above post I think you should be choosing 9600 dpi, 2592 pixels x 1944 pixels. Try that and see what the results are, it's possible that you will end up with very large file sizes but that's good for archive purposes.

Do you have any Canon software for your scanner? it occurs to me that it might give you clearer options than Arcsoft.
Click to expand...

Steep

Thanks for the above information. The ArcSoft PhotoStudio is supplied with the Scanner and is the most suitable in my case, as I can put 4 slides into the holder supplied with the scanner and these are individually recognised by the program software. So this is the way to go.

Now down to jpg or tif. All other pictures I have over the years are saved as jpg.

When I scan at the resolution and size you recommend, I end up with every slide taking around 4 minutes to scan and producing a tif file around 14mb in size, and a jpg file around 4mb. So a holder with 4 slides in it is going to be far too long at 16 minutes.

Obviously I am going to have to compromise, so is it best that I keep the highest resolution at 9600 dpi and choose a smaller screen size?

I have found scanning the same picture gives the following:

1. At 9600 dpi at 1600 x 1200 gives me a file size of 5.49mb but takes 4 minutes.

2. At 9600 dpi at 1280 x 1024 gives me a flile size of 3.75mb but only takes 1 minute.

So the second option (2) seems to be the best compromise, given that I will probably never print any of them out. but if I do I will never ever go anywhere near A4. Thought please?
 
Well do some and if you're happy stick with that method. I'd still go for TIF over jpg though when saving the images, regardless of what resolutions you choose. TIF holds much more colour information than jpg and much more detail which is going to be better in the long run. Remember you can always make a copy and convert that to jpg later if you need to post it or email it.
 
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