I’ve been looking at one of these today:

Epson V300 perfection scanner

so that I can scan in my photos (and negs) so I can play around with my photos in photoshop, PCworld have said they would match amazons £68.00 which seems reasonable, anyone got one or equivalent?

Yeah, I’ve got a very similar one, different colour but Epson and button layout looks the same. It has a plastic frame that you put either film or slides in (different slots), which then lays on the glass. The white background on the inside of the lid is removable, and it reveals a slot that reflects the light down through the slides/film.

Works OK, software detects what you are scanning and can do several frames in one go – four slides at a time and probably one film strip. Puts them into separate files.

Quality is reasonable, make sure glass and slides are clean!

I’ll upload some of the scans (which have been tidied in photoshop – they were 40 year old slides) to flickr and post an example.

Example Picture (tidied up a little)

Is that an Arab car?

Ear, Nutter; you need owt help or advice with Photoshop and scanners and stuff, you let me know, eh?

I would actually suggest something a bit pricier, tbh, if you’re going to scan a lot of film in. You’d get better results, as teh optical resolution will be higher, and the scanners will be more sophisticated etc. The lower-end models are more geared up for standard images, than film.

Want to buy my spensive film scanner off me?!

Bit more expensive but bought my parents a Canon 8800f for Christmas to scan film and the results are very impressive and reasonably quick dependent on the output quality.

That’s my Dad’s Austin Healy Sprite MkIII, from when he was stationed in Aden in the 60’s.

Ah…

I was thinking; it’s possibly a military type establishment, somewhere in’t Middle East, actually.

Personally, I’d give it a bit more yellow; looks a bit blueish to me.

it’s not a blue cast but cyan you need to add red not yellow

MrSmith is right. More yellow would make it greeny.

This is 2 seconds in Photoshop. Curves; a tiny bit more red. I couldn’t be bothered playing any more with it, but you get what I’m on about.

S’why PS, or PS Elements are such fantastic bits of software. Some of the ‘free’ programs come with basic image correction tools, but PS is the daddy!

BTW, beej; not a criticism of your efforts, but it was bugging me, the blue-ness!

I have an Epson scanner with a separate light source for film & slides, however, the light path is ‘specular’ ie direct, so every single bit of dirt on the source (and scanner glass) is perfectly reproduced, and both surfaces are highly static prone, pulling crap out of the air 🙁

Thanks for the tips actually – I’m a total novice with PS elements. So, curves, bit more red. I’ll have a go! I’ve only used the auto-correct stuff really.

Does Elements have the Curves feature? I forget. I bloody teach PS as well, and use a bit of Elements! Useless! I think it has something like that, anyway. What you need, is to be able to tweak the Red, Green and Blue channels independently. I haven’t got Elements here, so I can’t actually find out.

That above did literally only take a few seconds. Playing around with it, you could tweak the Saturation a bit, make it a bit ‘punchier’, but a lot of things are down to personal preference. I try to teach my students to exercise restraint, as it’s easy to go overboard, and be left with really garish, artificial results.

There. I’ve tweaked the Saturation just a bit, to give it a bit more ‘oomph’, but it’s starting to look a bit funky, tbh.

rudeboy, you replaced blueness with overexposure 🙁

Yes, it has something similar – Enhance – Adjust Lighting – Levels, lets you select R G or B and turn it up. THe adjust colour curves in elements doesn’t seem to allow a specific colour to be chosen. I think I might buy a book – any recommendations?

this isn’t helping, I think I may dash off to pukworld!!

how much for that shonly old scanner you keep your gerbil on then Rudeboy?

I’m afraid I got a little bit carried away! Not had me medication yet…

Andy Warhol was a fraud…

Barnes; that’s all right, I reckon! The light areas in the original are bleached out anyway. I think it helps the car to stand out more. Feel free to have a tweak yerself!

Sorry, Nutt. Just trying to be helpful!

beej; books? Get to a bookshop, have a look through a few, and go for one you feel comfortable with. I’m sure there’s loads! I prefer ones with lots of colour pics, but they tend to be spensive. I use Peachpit Press books, but they are aimed more at the ‘pro’ market, I spose. The Photoshop Bible (Wiley) is fantastic, but very heavy. If you’re using elements, then go for a book specific to Elements, rather than full-fat PS, as that would be confuddling. I need to research some good books, actually, to recommend to my students.

Feel free to have a tweak yerself!

I have 800 odd snaps of Ingleborough, PyG and surrounds covered in snow to work on today after sudden and inexplicable front brake failure stops me riding 🙁

snowy mountains and totty too :o)

don’t add red with curves either use hue/saturation/brightness, photo filter at a low percentage or channel mixer as an adjustment layer.

Too much faffage. I did that with a bit of Curves, and Hue/Saturation. It’s all right, is that. I was demonstrating a point; not trying to produce a ‘perfect’ image. I think the car stands out really well, against a slightly overexposed background. Focuses attention on the car more. That’s my preference, anyway.

Oh, and bear in mind beej has Elements, not the full-fat version. Not all the full PS features are available in Elements.

That’s the thing about Photoshop. So many ways, to achieve very similar results.

Spurs should’ve had a penalty.

this is a bit better as the green of the trees is now green and the whites are a bit more neutral but you can only go so far without masking things off.

Yes, see what you’re saying, but the red there still looks just a tiny bit ‘cold’, for my liking. And I don’t see the car standing out quite so well.

See, that’s the trouble with personal preference- no two people will see it the same.

I had a right argument with my coder mate, once. I was telling him that his chosen background colour was ‘greenish’; he insisted that it was a neutral grey. When I investigated his HTML code, I found it to be a very slight grey green, as neutral/’pure’ colours/tones have ‘FFO000’ or ‘808080’ or something., as their hexdec code. His was way off, ‘b3b8a4’ or something, so I knew it weren’t neutral. Turned out his screen calibration was way out!

How d’you get that result, out of interest? Like the neutral grey of the buildings a little better.

Question for Beej…

I’ve had one of these scanners in my Amazon basket for a while, but I’ve hesitated to buy it until I knew it was what I was after (got around 8000 slides to scan!). I’m not looking for ultimate quality, but something that will give decent archive quality at around 5Mpixel resolution.

Question is: how does the scan above compare with the original 60’s slide?

In terms of sharpness, saturation etc.

I know the scan looks a bit under-saturated but is that due to faded emulsions in the slide, or is the scanner not picking up the full range of tones/colours?

I’d say it’s probbly deterioration in the emulsion itself. Slides last a lot longer than prints, but still lose colour.

I’m actually coming round to MrSmith’s version! Still would like punchier red, but it’s funny, seeing the subtle differences side by side.

Yes, I have spent HOURS worriting about such things!

flickr changes the colours. the car has a better red colour. this is a screen grab of the CS3 image next to the flickr one. it’s the same image and my firefox is colour profile aware even though the image has no profile so is probably sRGB (and flickr will change the colour of the screengrab)

i used red at 15% a channel mix layer and a colour balance layer as the colour cast was not consistent with the brightness. it’s starting to get posterisation in the sky and roof between highlight and mid tone as there isn’t enough colour channel information to push around.

the better red needs to be mixed with the sky of the first one, it’s still too cyan in the one on the right but the greens are better..

It’s the age of the slides, they aren’t that brilliant to start with. Scans come out at about 2.1 megapixels.

Thanks for all the advice – and I’ve saved some of the adjusted ones (and the Warhol one) to compare with my attempts.

Here’s one of me helping the Queen plant a tree. I’ve got the cool blue parka and flares on.

Yes, I see. Interesting (I bet others are thinking ‘what are those two geeks prattling on about?’). I often use a method of selecting an area that should be neutral grey, with the eyedropper tool, seeing the RGB channel data in the Info window, then you add up the 3 values, divide by 3 to get an average, then set those values in the output box in Curves, in each colour channel. Doesn’t always work (some images can have freaky colour), but it can be very very accurate in achieving perfect colour balance. I’ve used it to correct images from slides, where different brands have their own very subtle colour casts (or bloody strong magenta, with that horrible Scotch 3200ASA colour slide stuff).

I love Photoshop, me!

Do you think anyone’s noticed the hi-jack yet? 😕

Nice one beej! She likes a bit of gardening, don’t she, the Queen?

She claims to, but in my experience, a bloke does it all for her the day before, then she turns up in a big car with a strange man (who is wearing one brown glove), and proceeds to shovel two small spade fulls of earth on the tree. She then tells all the world that she planted it, and has a brass plaque installed by the tree.

Faker.

I use a Epson 4490 scanner, again its a flatbed but it can scan both 35mm and 120/220 film (medium format). Can pick it up for about £110 these days, but if your only shooting 35mm(normal) sized film, the scanner youre looking at will be fine!

wot scanner fred? Keep faffing about this. I think i got 2 options, buy a good scanner, use then sell on, or just pay to get them scanned. prolly go with the latter though, cos time is money….and i’ve got other things i need to be doin.

and wots this bout layers in PS, never used it, only aperture. considering it to use as an external editor on some pics. Anyone with experience able to compare app with PS?

sorry for slight hijack MrN.

don’t worry about the ‘hijack’ It’s actually very interesting!!

I’m scanning in a load in and I’ll stick them all in a photobucket for you all to looky over 🙂

then I’ll have a play with ye olde photoshoppe

MrNutt,

What software do you get in the box? Does it come with PS Elements?

Ds Ds Ds.

I have a lovely Minolta Dimage 5400 scanner, which is sadly no longer supported, as Minolta were bought by Konica, then Sony, who very kindly decided to cut all support to Minolta customers.

S’all right, Sony. I’ll just bomb your London offices, and smash your Walkmen on Oxford St, you uncaring ****.

it came with some godawful ArcSoft rubbish which was a proper ball ache to uninstall but the Epson software is ok

results here: my long photo post

Polarisandy; Aperture is more an image organising tool; like a more powerful version of iPhoto, from what I can tell. I haven’t used it, so I can’t really comment on it too much. Photoshop is the industry-standard image processing/manipulation application. It is very, very complex, and very powerful; offers stuff that works with video and 3-D apps. On the surface, lots of other apps, like Aperture, Elements, GIMP, etc. Look simliar, but PS has loads more ‘under the bonnet’. That’s why it’s £700 or so!

‘Layers’ are PS’s way of being able to add layers to an image (Elements uses layers too, and possibly one or two other apps, I don’t know); a bit like layers of acetate on top of each other, or onion skins. You can add layers that adjust the way the whole image looks, or to build up a complex composite. The Multicar image I did above, is constructed using several layers, to form the whole image. Each car, and background, is a separate layer, so 12 in all. An incredibly useful feature. With single layer images, you are working with the pixels of that layer; in PS, you can work with multiple layers, and not affect the underlying original image. I often copy layers (as above), and try different things, with each, to see what effect I can achieve. Plus, you can put text layers to overlay an image; stuff like that.

I love Photoshop, me…

Cheers MrN & RB. Yep aperture is great for organising photos.
I just want to try and do a bit more with my photos.
i.e. make them look better “pop”

Guess i should try to take better ones in the first place rather than adjusting them..