Digital Light & Color

Tony, if you decide to use the Levels and Color widget, you can also enhance the contrast using the new Contrast slider that was added to the transformation recently. I think it should also apply a general symetrical S shaped curve which might be just what you need, unless you want or need to create a special or irregular S shape curve with Brightness Curve transformation.

David

Thanks David,

Good incentive to upgrade this morning.

Tony

Tony,

in the years before digital cameras I bought a dedicated film scanner and scanned both negatives and slides. Because of the high density of the slides it is even more challenging than scanning negatives.
The Minolta film scanner had sloppy software and I decided to buy VueScan. Never used the original Minolta software anymore. VueScan does an excellent job in converting the negative film colors in a digital positive and there are a few very useful settings to enhance the scan. I expect that batch editing the scans will be a lot easier than with the Epson software.
I hope that your Epson scanner has an infrared channel to detect dust, because in my experience clean color negatives do not exist and the scans will be full of white spots. The only clean negatives that I saw were the b/w negatives that I had developed myself.
Good luck and take heart, film scanning is something for the brave.

Thanks Hans,

As I was trying to say when I replied to Dieter my concern is speed and not quality perfection.

I want a web browsable summary of what negatives exist. I want to create it as quickly and painlessly as possible and then get back to having a life taking new pictures.

If anyone looks at it and says an image looks interesting enough to print or reproduce I will rescan it with more care.

The advantage of the Epson Scan software is that it identifies the individual negs and Vuescan seems not to. So I can load 24 negs and let Epson Scan turn them all into low DR positives. Whilst it is doing that I can be loading the next holder of 24 negs and doing some enhancing with PWP in workflow mode.

The main problem I hit yesterday is PWP sometimes had problems loading new images when Epson Scan was running. This could be a processor overload problem so I need to do some more testing today. The other danger is overwriting the scanned originals with a bad conversion - but that was me not being careful enough over the choice of destination directory (more haste, less speed!).

I also bought a Minolta. That was probably ten years ago. It is still on my desk but it is so slow compared with the Epson that it will shortly be put on eBay.

Tony

Tony,
It's definately a good idea to put outputs of a workflow in a separate folder and not to overwrite the original files. Too much can happen, a mistake is made so quickly, so better be safe then sorry.
As with VueScan, I believe you need the Pro version to identify the single negatives, but don't hold me on that, it's quiet a while since I did scan full film strips.
I had a Minolta Scan Elite 5400, not the fastest but good quality for it's price, even on Kodachromes (my prefered slide material back in the old days).

Han,

film scanning is something for the brave

I agree with all my heart :)

I'm using the Workflow and widgets and it is working fine.

However, I never seem to be able to load a second batch pictures without closing the Workflow and starting another one.

When I try to load another batch, or reload the ones I did a second time, every 'icon' says 'Loading'.

Is this a bug or simply me not having enough capacity on my PC?

Tony

This sounds like a bug that has been fixed in 7.0.15. Please make sure that you are current. The latest release is 7.0.17 and is available here:

http://www.dl-c.com/site/downloads/pwp-apps.php

Kiril

Thanks Kiril,

I downloaded the new version this morning.

Tony

As I said above I am using the latest version.

It seems that I can add another image to a workflow I have actioned and it will load.

'Remove All Images' seems to be the culprit in not loading a new selection after it has been used to clear the old selection. It is no big problem to close the workflow and save any changes - but it would be good to have the bug removed some time.

Tony

Tony,

I have no problems here with adding images to a existing Workflow window.
When the workflow is executed and I want to add more images I select all, then right click in one of the selected image and clicking "Remove Images form Window".
No problem adding new images either from Browser or via Add files.
It's not clear to me what you mean with "Remove all Images" ?