 Charlyce Altom |
How to Convert Film Images to Digital When I have my film processed, I also have the images scanned to a CD. I have been practicing enhancing those images on the CD with Photoshop Elements 2, with varying degrees of success. After I finish with an image, I save it to another CD, then I take it back to the shop to have those images printed. I have been mostly disappointed with the results. Before I started this learning project, I asked the technicians what I needed to do to make sure I didn't lesson the quality of the print. They said to make sure I saved with a resolution of 256-300 dpi. This is actually the resolutions showing on the orignal disc from the photo lab. I did this, but the images still look flat and somtimes grainy. I have had the images printed at 3 different locations and I don't see much difference, except in expense. Am I beating my head against a wall that isn't going to move? I'd love to be able to work with Photoshop in this way, but maybe it isn't designed to work with this format. Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.
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Joan Bellinger |
Have you considered printing the photos at home? Currently, I use HP Deskjets to print my photos from the CD. I use glossy or matte photo paper, either Kodak, HP or Great White. I always print 8x10 images and have been happy with the results.
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Lewis Kemper |
It sounds as if you are doing the correct procedure as far as maintaining the proper file size for a good print. The problems you are facing with flat and grainy images is probably due to a lack of good calibration and profiling by you and the printers. If your images are flat on all 3 different printers than your monitor is probably not calibrated correctly and what you are seeing on the screen is not accurate. The grain problem can be from doing too much to the file in Elements, bad scans, or bad proflies for output. I would say you first need to calibrate your monitor to even begin to have predictable results!
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Sreedevi Swaminathan |
I agree that calibrating is a good idea, but even if it's completely uncalibrated, and hasn't been previously calibrated for something else, your images should still turn out well. You mentioned resolution, but you never mentioned anything about file type. Are you making sure they're all uncompressed tif files? That's important, because with jpegs, the image gets worse and worse each time you resave it. But in any case, you want them to do at least 300 dpi scans from your neg., and save them as tifs. and you shouldn't have to change this at all when editing. But more importantly, where exactly are you having this done? I know my brother goes to wal-mart and gets his pictures put on a picture cd too, and he'll email me images, or try to send me printouts, and it makes me feel very sick. Those scans are typically worse than what I get from my Epson scanner. If you can't afford a scanner yourself, it would help to go to a place that does higher end scans. You don't need a drum scanner unless you're going to print up professional 16x20 photos- and this can get quite expensive. Maybe try going to a private photo lab and ask them if they have high quality film scanners. You can get a good photo printer for under $100- the ink is expensive however. And your prints should come out pretty good. I think the Epson Stylus 820 and Stylus C82 are pretty good quality. I'd go for the C82, however, because it has separate ink cartridges for each color, and the 820 drives me crazy since there's just a color and a black cartridge. And if one color of ink is out, then the whole cartridge will be rendered useless. And experiment with the papers. While calibrating your monitor is a great idea, as long as it hasn't been calibrated, I'd leave it alone for a while, until you have a better understanding what exactly is wrong with your images consistently, and can see what it is that needs fixing on your monitor. Also, I have PS, so I don't know if elements comes with the Adobe Gamma- check and see if Adobe Gamma is in your control panel. But if it doesn't, then you'll have to buy some sort of monitor calibration tool. If it does, just make sure you save your current uncalibrated profile under some other name, just so you don't end up screwing up your monitor settings too much- just go through the gamma wizard without changing any settings, and save the profile at the end. Hope this helps you out.
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- Shirley D. Cross-Taylor Contact Shirley D. Cross-Taylor Shirley D. Cross-Taylor's Gallery |
Unless you pay a lot for the scan, your lab is probably not going to do high enough resolution scans for the manipulations you wish to do later. You may want to invest in your own film scanner, if you plan to do a lot of prints from digital files. Then you can scan at a high resolution and make many adjustments at the time of the scan. Also, do not save your files to jpeg, since this compresses the file automatically, and could be causing the 'flat' grainy look. Save to TIFF, which will maintain the full-size file. Shirley Cross
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photosbysharon.com - Sharon E. Lowe Contact Sharon E. Lowe Sharon E. Lowe's Gallery |
Just to add my 2 cents, when you get your images scanned to a CD at the time of processing, I think most places do them at 72dpi, because they assume you just want to be able to post them to the web. I know I had some scanned to CD at Target and they were the worst images I have ever seen (and they had been taken by a pro photographer so I don't think it was his fault!). But, if yours really are scanned at the resolution you say they are, the scan shouldn't be a problem. You don't say what enhancements you are doing but the jpeg compression issue could be a major part of your problem as could several other things you could be doing to enhance the images. If you can afford the equipment, I agree that you are much better off getting your own scanner (the Epson 3200 flatbed is a great scanner and you can get it with upgraded scanning software (for a price) that is definitely worth it if you plan to do a lot of scanning) and printer. You can get reasonably priced, very good printers, especially if you don't want to print anything beyond an 8x10. As for ink, you just have to be careful about what you print.
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Charlyce Altom |
Thanks so much for all of you help and comments. I am in the process of making a new CD with TIFF images. I'll let you know how things turn out with this project. Thanks again.
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Kip T. Berger |
Just wondering: was my understanding that opening and closing a jpeg will not result in any lossy info. Only if you open and actually do any type of adjustment to the image before closing will it lose any pixel info. Also will help to use the same color profile for your photo program, and printer.
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- Shirley D. Cross-Taylor Contact Shirley D. Cross-Taylor Shirley D. Cross-Taylor's Gallery |
You're right, Kip. Opening and closing will not change it, but if you re-save, it compresses it further.
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