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Scanning quality -


ShivaYash

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Hello,

 

Sounds daft but I am seriously shocked by the differences a 'professional' scan can make to the look of a photograph. I've been relying on lab scans, via a Fuji Frontier, but now have my own 'professional' scanner, a Pakon.

 

This evening I re-scanned a roll and the film stock looks totally different, and much more in keeping with my tastes, subdued colour and reduced harsh sharpness.

 

See the two attached examples... I'd be interested in hearing your comments. 

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I agree. Modern "digital age" taste is to turn color saturation and contrast up for brighter color and more visual impact, which is also the default setting on TVs. Doesn't look natural to me, but a well-known blogger writes about how he always turns saturation up on his cameras. (He also rates Leica color as "poor" and raves about Velvia."

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Nothing miraculous is happening, a little post processing would make either picture look how you want it to look, hardly a need for re-scanning. The pro-scan simply reflects what many people expect, bright over saturated colours, but it shouldn't take more than two minutes in Lightroom or Photoshop to rectify that. Of course scanning for yourself you can make your own choices at the scanning stage. But the very best scanning technique of making a low contrast scan to gain the most information does require some knowledge of post processing, not to mention having an opinion as to how a picture should look rather than expecting/hoping a scanner can do it for you.

Edited by 250swb
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I used to rely on Fuji Frontier scans back in the day before I had my own scanner. I thought those lab scans were great for delivering 'pop' and sharpness. However they were also handed over as jpegs and did not leave a lot of scope for further processing.

The revelation for me in doing my own scanning was that I could get, and manipulate, richer general tonality, and other attributes, before then compressing to jpg. It is the far greater overall control end-to-end which is the advantage. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I have scanned my Kodachrome slides multiple times with diffeent methods and finally settled on the results of shooting with Canon 100mm macro against a light table. There is hardly any more info in my slides after 10mp.

 

In your scanned pics I notice only the color processing differences as others have pointed out.

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Second (bottom) baby shot is much sharper and refined, just needs the colour balance sorting, but first (top) bicycle shot is sharper and more refined, the colour balance isn't to bad. But which are the lab scans?

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