Scanner Question

[aweins]

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I've noticed that some of my scanned photos have a small area, someone's face for example, that seems to lack some detail. These aren't portraits, just a face in the crowd (to steal a movie title). The problem sometimes occurs when I post photos on the web. Is it because I'm going from a large 50+ MB Tiff file to a JPEG?

 

I use a Nikon Coolscan V ED, Ektar, Fuji Superia 400, and either the Kodak or Ilford C-41 b&w films. Camera and lenses are either Leitz, Konica Hexanon M, or Nikkor. All the editing is in LR4, not the scanner software. I don't think it's the equipment.

 

Any ideas on how to prevent the loss of detail?

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[pico]

I've noticed that some of my scanned photos have a small area, someone's face for example, that seems to lack some detail. These aren't portraits, just a face in the crowd (to steal a movie title). The problem sometimes occurs when I post photos on the web. Is it because I'm going from a large 50+ MB Tiff file to a JPEG?

 

Absolutely. Resampling degrades detail through aliasing, and degrades the signal-to-noise ratio. Besides, there are simply not enough pixels on the resampled image to make a small area clear on our typical screens.

[250swb]

If you are doing all your post processing in Lightroom (which is a good thing rather than use the crude scanner software) the amount of sharpening you give for various sizes of image is critical to get the most detail out. You can apply some mild sharpening before working on the tones etc, but the main sharpening should be done when you have your finished image at the size you want to make it. So save your unsharpened finished image as a TIFF (your master image), then re-size it for the web, or for print etc., and then sharpen those images according to their finished size and pixel count.

 

Steve