Vuescan setting advice please

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Hi All,

Since the weathers poo, I have decided to dust off the scanner (Epson v500) and start scanning the large backlog of photos that I have been given by relatives. These mostly date from 1950s to 1980s. The older pictures mostly smaller black and white prints, some 2" and 3" square colour prints, and the more recent prints lower quality colour 6x4.

What settings would you recommend. I only wish to scan them once so don’t mind erring on the side of quality.

Will scanning everything at 1600dpi, 48bit rgb output be overkill?
Is it preferable to enable any of the options under the filter options (e.g.resore colours, restore fading...)
 
You may well find that scanning at 600dpi is more than good enough and 48bit RGB should be fine. I would suggest that if all you want is just a simple copy then use the default settings with regard to the other options. When I want to recover old photographs I prefer to use a basic scan and do all the recovery work in Photoshop. I hope this helps.
 
Rapscallion said:
Will scanning everything at 1600dpi, 48bit rgb output be overkill?
Is it preferable to enable any of the options under the filter options (e.g.resore colours, restore fading...)
Click to expand...

I don't remember what the native resolutions (ie not interpolated) of the V500 are, but I seem to remember 300, 600, 1200, 2400 on the list. Scanning a 3" square print at 1200 dpi will give you an image 3600 pixels square, printable at 300 dpi to 12" square. So magnified times 4. At this scale, the original print quality is probably more of a limiting factor than the scanner, so unless it's an excellent print, probably not worth going higher. Indeed as Norman says, 600 dpi might be appropriate. But think about what you want to use the image for. And test a few at different settings.

Likewise, I's probably worth doing test runs of scans from a print with the restore options you mentioned. I did use them for some ancient negatives, and I was never sure whether they were worth it. I didn't get consistent results, but sometimes the results were better than I could get any other way. I know a bit more (only a bit) about colour correction now, so I might not use them so much these days.

There's something to be said for doing a "flat" scan, just adjusting the black and white points to capture the maximum information, leaving everything else standard, and doing any needed correction in your favourite PP program. Remember that Vuescan silently remembers past settings, so if you turn on a restore option (or any other) it will usually stay on until changed, or reset!
 
Thanks all. One more question - which output colour space. It is defaulted to Apple RGB, however in Lightroom and Photoshop I use Prophoto.
 
I'll just add a voice of ignorance, rather than experience, in scanning prints (although it's something I will have to do sooner rather than later). If my calculations are correct, the standard of 300 dpi for printing works out at around the equivalent of 6 lppm (or do I mean lpm?). Either way, a good quality glossy conventional black and white photographic print has a resolution of about 30 l(p)pm, meaning that to reach the standard of a conventional inkjet print you could enlarge it by a factor of around 5. Hence, if the scanner supports it, you might find that you would get a better quality enlargement if you scanned at a higher resolution.

Like all things photographic, it depends on what you want the results for.
 
Reading the comments, I think I will stick to 1200dpi for the smaller black and white prints to give some room for enlargement, and 600dpi for the more modern 6x4 colour prints.
 
I use a V550, which I believe has the same resolution and probably the same sensor. I ran a few tests scanning medium format film and decided that scanning at 3200dpi then down-sizing it to 2200dpi gave me the best results in terms of detail vs file size.
 
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