Thanks for all the thoughts, Moose. After getting all this set up, I
read Ctein's article on TOP. It was discouraging, but I went ahead and
did it anyway. It worked, so no arguing with success. Oh, I didn't
mention that we are in the middle of remodeling my den. So the
scanners--both my Epson V370 flatbed and the Canon FS-4000 are in boxes,
piled up with all my other stuff in the kitchen.
Ctein is right about one thing, spotting is a pain. I promised myself
that I would just clean up the faces, but I can't help myself, and I
spot more. IIRC, using VueScan's IR dust removal on low intensity
worked decently on Kodachrome last time I scanned slides. The problem is
that by the time you get done with one pass for normal exposure, maybe
another for underexposed areas, plus another for the IR dustbuster, it
can take forever. Scanning at less then full resolution helps, since (as
we've both seen) there isn't more detail to be had, anyway.
So it's a case of "pick your poison." I'll have to try the FS-4000 again
once my den is put back together again. Right now, I just have a
gazillion boxes of slides sitting there waiting to be digitized, and a
couple of eighty-something aunties who are just loving reliving their
teenage years through the images. Most of them haven't been seen in 60
years. Thank you, Mannes and Godowsky for making the stuff last.
After my first post below, I read this: <http://www.scantips.com/es-1.html>
Which has a link to these:
<http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=52mm+diameter+extension+tube&_sacat=625&_fromfsb=&_trksid=m270.l1313&_odkw=52mm+diameter+extension+tube&_osacat=0>
I calculated that two of these 21mm tubes screwed together should be
long enough to copy the slides with my 50/3.5 OM Zuiko macro. So I've
ordered them. The lens might be a bit more even across the field, and
easier to focus than the 28/2.8. A couple of tubes from Hong Kong are
not a wallet-buster like a new $400 micro 4/3 macro lens.
--Peter
-----------
> Also Sprach Moosathustra:
>> On 2/22/2016 6:38 PM, Peter Klein wrote:
> What great fun, to get those old family snaps digitized! I had fun
spinning
through them.
>> Thanks for the feedback, Chuck: The ES-1 slide copier is advertised
to work with Nikon full-frame macro lenses of 50 or 60mm. Micro 4/3 is
about 2x, so I couldn't use my 50/3.5 OM macro, which would be 100
equivalent. Too bad. I'd need several inches of extension between the
lens and the ES-1. A standard 4/3 Olympus macro of 35/3.5 is still
available, which is reasonably priced today and might work if it's not
too long for the ES-1. There's also a Panasonic micro 4/3 30/2.8 macro
which I know will work, because a friend uses it. But it lists for just
under $400.
> Wow, that gets complicated. It projects like that that make my head
hurt. Fortunately, I've accumulated a lot of macro gear, lenses,
bellows, tubes, etc. so I can set up pretty much any magnification I
want. I think, though, that I'd prefer a copy stand or tripod and one of
those inexpensive 4x5" "light tables to working with the Nikon thingie
that makes the set-up so hard. Kinda backwards to be looking at multi
hundred $ lenses to accommodate a $50 slide holder, no?
>> The slides are indeed very contrasty. I'm bringing the shadows up a
bit in Capture One as I process the RAW files, but doing that beyond a
certain point just makes them ugly.
>> None of the slides are super-sharp. Under a 30x loupe, the grain is
sharp, but all the images have some motion blur or misfocus. No wonder,
we're
talking ASA 10 film here. That's 1/80 at f/5.6 of 1/160 at f/4 in bright
sunshine, and it just gets slower from there.
> Yup, yup. I have a few late 30s-early 40s family Kodachromes. None
are really sharp, even the better ones. I compared a 4000 dpi film scan
to a 12 MP
5D shot with the bellows and slide copier attachment. There was no
meaningful difference.
> OTOH, back when my then flat bed scanner died, I looked around and
ended up with a Canon 9950F, which will scan 12 slides at once. There
are two advantages to that over the camera route. It's a lot less fuss;
just drop the slides in the holder, and let the scanner do its thing.
AND - dust removal. This didn't work very well with KRs until lately.
But now both VueScan ans SilverFast have figured out how to make it work
pretty well. I HATE spotting! Nothing awful in these of yours,
especially as memories, not serious images, but lots of little black specks.
> BTW, the ancient Polaroid dust removal software will nicely clean up
those skies, if you are willing to use masks to separate detail areas
from skies, etc. Here's an example using a slide from Brian's youth.
<http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/BSwale/Home2_dipton-srp15-1200px.htm>
>> I'm thinking that the 28/2.8 OM lens may be good enough. It does not
quite resolve the film grain, although I can still focus the camera on
the grain texture at 14x electronic magnification. But what's the point
of resolving the grain if the highest resolution of the image is lower
than that? The images I'm getting looks to me as good as I see under the
loupe.
> A lot of older film images just don't have much detail. And it's not
just motion blur; many of the lenses weren't all that good, either. I
have a bunch of my dad's 6x7 negs fro a Kodak folder, which adds the fun
of film/lens misalignment. There's just no point scanning them at more
than 300 dpi, 'cause there's just no more detail there.
>> If I find a slide that really warrants it, I can always get out the
Canon FS-4000 film scanner. It can do a dual pass scan to open up the
shadows. But for most of the work, this is *so* much faster and easier.
> Such reverse experiences! My FS4000 is sitting right next to the
computer and hooked up all the time. The old story was that the USB was
impossibly slow, but it was poor early hardware implementations of USB
2.0. With the USB on this computer, USB seems to be as fast as the
scanner data stream, and thus as the SCSI connection I used to use. Turn
it on, and it's ready to go in a few seconds.
> So if I need to scan a few slides, it's much quicker and easier to
toss them in the scanner four at a time and let it and VueScan do their
thing while I do other things.
--
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