Normal grain or not?

[Allen in Montreal]

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..........

 

He even advised me NOT to use their film lab anymore ..........

 

I dusted off a 15 year old Minolta Dimage Dual scanner.........

 

my 10 year old Power Mac G4 was up and running again on a contemporary OS 9.2 system, Photoshop 6.0 and . It feels like computer archeology . The first results of the Minolta are now slowly filling the hard disk, and they look promissing........

 

 

When I have some scans look reasonable, I will post them here.

 

Thanks for your support,

Dirk

 

I did the same for my Linotype, it runs on a first Gen 233mhz G3. It may be slow, but it works very well. Enjoy the scanning, looking forward to seeing results.

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[dpitt]

The first foto seems very hard to scan properly. Until now there is not much improvement there.

 

Some more luck with most of the others. This is what came out after some tweaking of the settings and light processing in photoshop. The crop is 100% as before, only slightly larger because my oldtimer has a lower resolution.

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[dpitt]

Allen,

 

If you want to speed up things you probably can upgrade to a faster system that is able to boot Os 9. Most drivers will be compatible with that. You can always check for compatibility online. The youngest and fastest that can boot Os 9 is the PowerMac G4 933 Mhz. See

Power Macintosh G4 933 (QS 2002) Specs (Quicksilver 2002, M8666LL/A, PowerMac3,5, M8493, 1896) @ EveryMac.com

and

Apple Power Mac G4 Specs (All Power Macintosh G4 Technical Specs) @ EveryMac.com

 

Anything above 500 single processor will do because Os 9 does not make use of dual processors I think.

[dpitt]

BTW

The scanner used by the mini lab is a Frontier SP3000. I don't know much about scanners but maybe some of you have more experience.

[pico]

This might seen counter-intuitive, but in some cases using an extreme resolution setting can produce worse results: noise + grain. Noise is white. Grain is black. Look at the enlargement of the boy's face. It has both.

[Allen in Montreal]

Allen,

 

If you want to speed up things you probably can upgrade....... .

 

Thanks Dirk, slow but very good is fine for me, don't want to mess with success.

 

I have to restart the old bitty after 2 scans of a gig (5x7 or 8x10 negs) or larger as scratch disk just does not purge but it gives really nice results.

 

This scanner setup seems to like t-max the best, HP-5 in pyro scans well. Tri-x is just OK.

[dpitt]

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Allen,

 

Thanks for the advice. I was thinking about TMax for my next experiment. Good to know it scans well.

 

It sounds like you spend a lot of time scanning. What does your workflow look like?

Do you make contactprints or so to select the ones you are going to scan?

[Allen in Montreal]

Hi Dirk,

 

I am not sure my work flow merits emulation!

 

I scan everything I shoot at 800 or 1000 spi for contact sheets.

Quick and dirty dry scan.

 

Depending on how I exposed, sometimes I have one neg exposed and processed for scanning, and another for silver prints.

 

I make 11x14 quick draft print outs of anything I want to print in the wet darkroom and tack to the wall for a few days before I print to digest it.

 

A) One neg only:

I print fiber prints of my selects.

Only after printing, I wet scan my selects in both LAB and Gray scale.

I file all scans on a LaCie drive that has a mirrored copy using SuperDuper.

I work on the file and and save the finished with the raw scan.

I keep a catalogue using Extensis Portfolio.

 

Two negs:

 

I print a fiber print from the "silver" neg and wet scan the B neg that was exposed and processed for scanning.

 

The Linotype does not seem to bump the grain over the top as the spi of the scan goes up, so I make all my scans at the highest for that format size.

An 8x10 neg, scanned LAB, is huge. I restart the old G3 after each scan. For 5x7 or 4x5 negs I can get 2 scans before a restart. I can make several 6x7 to 35mm scans in a row without issue.

 

I work on the files in CS on another machine.

My G3 has been stripped of every control panel and extension that is not needed.

No internet, no printer drivers, very few control panels remain, no word processing, zip!

There are no apps other than what is need to scan. But I need PS on the G3 to open the Linocolor Tiff files and then save them as CS Tiff.

 

I am sure there are better ways to work, but it works for me. The results are very nice and the only unpleasant part of the mission is cleaning the negs after an oil mounted scan.