Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Scanning Film Images to the Hard Drive

This is part of my Image Conversion Workflow.

This is the point in our workflow where we convert from film or slide to digital. For any photographers, myself included, that still enjoy the quality of a good negative and the absolute perfection of pressing a shutter and immediately getting the picture taken, this workflow will help you go from Negative to Digital. After conversion, the process is the same whether you start with a RAW file from a digital camera or a TIFF from your negative.

We will break down this Negative to Digital Workflow here.


  1. Develop film or negatives
  2. Determine file number for scanning
  3. Scanning the slides or negatives to the hard drive


There are many considerations when scanning negatives and slides. Here we discuss many of the important aspects to consider before beginning the process. We will discuss each item in detail and some of the settings we will experiment with various choices to ultimately determine which setting is the best to use.

  1. Hardware considerations
  2. GEM settings
  3. ICE settings
  4. ROC settings
  5. Sampling settings
  6. Bit deapth settings
  7. Unsharpening and sharpening settings
  8. Curve settings
  9. Other processing settings


As we continue to develop our workflow, we will also discuss applying efficiencies to our scanning workflow to automate as many settings as possible.

Don't forget to visit my photography web site where we sell museum quality black and white prints framed to last up to 175 years - Outdoor Images Fine Art.

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