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archving 35mm in tiff or highest jpg?

gooomz

Member
i will check out fotobridge.com

any other recommendations?

btw. i think you guys convinced me to spend the extra money and get the 16bit tiff scans but what is "prophoto rgb color space" and do i just ask for it or is it standard?
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
16-bit tiff because drives are so cheap. Jpeg only because you're lazy and want to store online. That said, for 35mm slide or B&W neg scans the difference in quality between 8-bit max jpeg and 16-bit tiff is negligible; but for the nuances in a color neg scan, 16-bit can be a real advantage -- especially if you are going to manipulate the color channels individually and/or apply dedicated profiles, which we usually do for color neg. Finally, with tiff there is no color degradation that you can get with jpeg every time you make any change and re-save it. Hence, I do everything as a 16-bit tiff as a matter of habit.

PS: Did I mention that drives are really cheap right now? A 2TB drive can be had for $90. You can store ~40,000 ~50MB files on it -- for a total cost of less than 1/3rd of a cent per image -- and have fully redundant back-up for another $90. How many scans do you have to save?
 

lance_schad

Workshop Member
i will check out fotobridge.com

any other recommendations?

btw. i think you guys convinced me to spend the extra money and get the 16bit tiff scans but what is "prophoto rgb color space" and do i just ask for it or is it standard?
My suggestion is to give a few of the services a try with a sample selection of slides. This will allow you to see how their customer service and quality is.

Besides www.Fotobridge.com (only ones I have first hand experience with )
there are:

Scancafe.com
Scandigital.com
imemories.com

numerous others if you google it.....


I would not just fill out an online form and mail your slides in, but I would engage them in a conversation first and make sure you are comfortable with them. I personally would not use a service that ships the job overseas to do the scanning.

Best of luck and look forward to hearing how you make out.

I know there are a lot of people out there in the same boat as you.

Lance
 
P

pmalmert

Guest
If you want to edit your images later you should definitely have them in TIFF and with a very high quality scanner that does not use interpolation (e.g. do not use Nikon CoolScan's ICE). It makes scans very fuzzy and eliminates details: the pixels around dust specks or scratches get replaced with pixels around that dust speck.

I tried to scan my slides with the Nikon CoolScan but getting rid of the dust specks was very difficult. Nikon's automatic dust and scratch removal software did not work for my Ektachrome or BW slides. On my other slides I got very blurry images since their dust removal software interpolates the pixels around the dust and scratches. Also many older slides hat color casts I could not get rid off. I found a scan service in Maryland called Truescan slide scan service http://truescan.us that scans everything manually on-site. They use a new technology that scans only the actual slide surface but not the dust on top or the scratches within the slides. I had them make some free test scans first. Then I sent them all my 600 slides. They look excellent (4000 dpi at no extra cost); very crisp even when I zoom in. Apparently, they use the same scan approach for negatives. They also offer saving your TIFFs as well as JPEGs of the same image on DVDs, Blueray disks, or even a hard drive. So you have the TIFFs for later editing and the JPEGs for viewing on your PC.
 
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