 BetterPhoto Member |
Scanning Film for Big Nature Prints I have recently decided to start printing my nature photography digitally, so I purchased the Nikon Coolscan 9000 film scanner (35mm and medium format). In order to have large prints made for me, I need to scan my transparencies at the right settings. I'm not sure what settings are the best: Do I need 4000 resolution? What size should I scan the image at? The Nikon manual just said something like: "Just set the resolution to 4000 and enter the size print you want." But the photography printing company said I only need 300 resolution. Do I need to enter the big size of print in the scanning program? Thanks, Josh
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Vince Broesch |
You've got two things going on here: 1)input (scanning) and 2)output (printing). The term DPI is really an output term, and scanning is better referred to as SPI (samples per inch). If I was scanning one inch of film, and I wanted to make a print 10 inches at 300 DPI, I would need to scan my one inch of film at 3000 SPI. I hope you see the math here. On the output side, as to document size, like if you look at the document size in Photoshop, that doesn't really mean anything. The important thing is how many pixels you have. If your document says "16x20 inch 72 DPI", that only means that IF you were to print it to 16x20, it would be at 72DPI. But, if you print it to 8x10, it would be print close to 300DPI. Math test: How many pixels do you need to print 20 inchs at 300 DPI? (Answer: 6000) If you scan 2 inches of film and you want 6000 pixels, how many samples per inch do you need to scan? (Answer: 3000) Also, don't be too afraid of printing at less than 300DPI. You might be happy with a print at 150 DPI. I hope this makes sense. If I explained something poorly, someone else might help us.
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doug Nelson |
You didn't cheap out on the scanner! Good choice. The less you do in the scanning program the better. Just let the image dimensions default to whatever it is, maybe 72 ppi. I WOULD, however, let the scanner's Digital Ice do its thing (except for Kodachrome, where it makes a mess). I scan at the max resolution and the max color bit depth - in your case, probably 16 bits PER Red, Green and Blue channel. The file size will be huge. Do your tonal and color corrections (Levels and/ or Curves) in Photoshop at the high bit setting. Then, in Image/Image Size, resample turned OFF, enter 300 ppi in the resolution block. You might want to archive these minimally fixed scans, uncropped, bit depth unchanged to CD. Submit these to your customer. To print them yourself, go to Image Mode and convert to 8-bit color. The file size will drop by half. Go to Image Size again and enter the print size you want. You might also Resample and, keeping that print size, go to 300 as your resolution. You might eventually want to look at Silverfast or Ed Hamrick's VueScan, as they seem to handle dense slides a bit better than Nikon's software.
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doug Nelson |
Whoops, almost forgot, medium format doesn't need 4000 ppi. Probably 2400 will do fine. See what print size that gives you at 300 ppi.
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