Image Science Scanning FAQ

(Frequently Asked Questions - Answered!)

On this page you will find more in-depth discussion about issues related to scanning - what we do, and why we do it.

 

About the Imacon Flextight 949

We have two main scanners here - the superb Imacon Flextight 949 , and the Nikon 4000ED we use to offer a more affordable scanning service.

The Imacon Flextight 949

The Imacon Flextight 949 is a superb scanner offering a dynamic range of 4.4 and excellent sharp results, for prints up to really large sizes. It really is optically sharp at each of its resolutions, has excellent shadow penetration, and in Fine Art print terms, scans made here on our Imacon have to date always been as good as, indeed almost always better, than any images we have seen drum scanned anywhere. This includes the same images compared side by side, printed over 60 inches in length (outputted on inkjets, and RGB printers like the Durst Lambda and the Kodak Pegasus).

Simply put, using this scanner we are able to offer the best ratio of quality to price available from any scanning service in this country.

The Imacon Flextight 949 is the very latest Imacon scanner available and is significantly better than even previous Imacon scanners - in terms of shadow penetration, sharpness and low noise, it is one of the best scanners on the planet and easily competes with any other scanner available.

Imacon Flextight 949 versus the Drum Scanners

Pretty much every major landscape photographer in the country now scans on Imacon machines. Landscape photographers (whether you like their work or not), are as picky on print quality as anyone. The production benefits of the Imacons, and the superb quality results, are hard to argue against. While technically some drum scanners offer better specs on paper, the reality is that very few people seem to be able to achieve optimum results with these machines in actual practice, and because your images must be oil mounted, there are many disadvantages to the process (not least of which is cost - our most expensive scans are sub $40...drums scans of a similar size and quality can not be had for less than $200!).

The Imacon Flextight has been described by some as a drum or 'virtual drum' scanner. People with 'real drum' scanners sometimes get upset by this. Which is quite silly - the Imacon IS a drum scanner in that the film is bent over a curved surface to result in scans with perfect edge to edge focus - exactly the same as a Howtek, Tango or whatever. What they really mean is that the sensor in the Imacon is not PMT, but CCD. Does this matter? Real world tests indicate it does not. Yes, CCDs are inherently slightly more noisy than PMTs but in practice the very high quality CCD inside the Imacon produces results which, in print terms, stand up to anything we have ever seen scanned in Australia. Try us and you'll see!

If you're looking for superb quality scans, the Imacon Flextight 949 will deliver.

Imacon versus the Flatbeds like Epson 2450, 4870, 4990, V700 etc.

We had an Epson 4870 sitting here on our desk, and used it occasionally to scan film larger than 4 by 5 inches. For the money, it isn't bad, but next to a scanner like the Imacon Flextight 949, it's a toy. It defeats the whole purpose of shooting the bigger formats - 6 by 6cm film scanned on the Epson is noticeably worse than 35mm scanned on even the Nikon scanner, when viewed as only an A4 sized print! Ask yourself why do you shoot medium or large format? To get truly fine prints, the whole chain must be right - from good technique during image creation and capture, through good processing, to good scanning, and on to good digital file processing and final output. If you're going to stick a thoroughly amateur device like a flatbed scanner in the middle of this process, you're going to have to expect thoroughly amateur results. The Epson simply isn't sharp, suffers from colour banding issues due to its cheap sensor, and offers poor shadow penetration. All of which are quite visible in prints.

If you're doing small prints from scans made with a flatbed, you may find the results 'sharp enough'. But sharpness is only one issue - what you might not immediately notice is the tonal compression that results from the flatbed's cheap sensor. This results in images that lack three dimensionality. It's less immediately obvious than the sharpness issues the flatbed's have, but possibly an even bigger problem!

About The Nikon 4000ED

The Nikon 4000ED is a remarkably sharp, capable scanner with 35mm film. It's not quite as sharp (particularly around the edges), or quite as good at penetrating the shadows as the Imacon, but it offers far superior automatic dust and scratch removal, and is a very cost effective solution. We've scanned the images for a number of books on the Nikon with great results. We have done literally thousands upon thousands of scans on the Nikon, and we really know how run this machine. Obviously we use much better software than the Nikon supplied software, for much more accurate colour, and our machine is regularly calibrated with an IT8 target to further improve colour response.

Our Scanning Methodology

For Image Science, scanning is a core service, and we have invested considerable time developing processes to produce the best possible scans.

On Colour and Detail (or the clipping of scans).

We do not clip your scans in any way.

We believe a truly fine print is always the ultimate goal of scanning. This means we scan a little differently to most other services, and you may initially find that your files look a little flat. There is a good reason for this, and of course our scans can be made to look exactly like other scans from labs etc. However, we got out of our way to give you maximum detail in your scans, so you can make the best prints possible.

The basic difference is that our scan is a more 'raw' scan, which is colour balanced but has not yet had the final black and white points set, and is giving you ALL the data the scanner can pull from the transparency (i.e. the full dynamic range).   Whereas other services often provide you with a scan that is essentially 'finished'.  We would argue that our method is better as it allow *you* more flexibility in setting the points - in the case of 'finished' scans, somebody has already made the decision for you (and clipped some pixels to pure black and pure white, which means you probably have lost detail)..their approach offers more initial bang, ours offers better fine printing options.

Our approach is for maximum detail - giving maximum flexibility.  To achieve the same result with our scans as theirs, you could just use the Photoshop levels command to shift the black and white points in a little.  However, a better way to do this would be to use an S curve, to increase contrast while NOT losing any detail. If you want us to provide clipped scans we can of course do this, but you are potentially limiting your options.  If you have a low key photograph say (i.e. the majority of the tones in the image are dark), that relies on good shadow detail, then their approach of providing clipped scans will be a big mistake.  Same goes for highlights, of course. The key thing is that our approach is to give you the best chance of getting all the detail off the slide, while theirs is to give you a scan you can immediately use.  Both have their benefits, but if you're in photography and you're interested in print quality, you should pretty much always be requesting unclipped scans.

On Sharpening

We don't. We do not apply any sharpening whatsoever to our scans. We offer scans only at the optical resolutions of our scanners, and we let you use your favourite sharpening workflow to get the best results for your printing process. Sharpening your scans during scanning is, in our opinion, very bad practice in a scanning service. Again, many services do it because it makes the initial impression of their work better, not because it offers you better results in the long term. Sharpening is a complicated topic, so if you want to discuss it further, please call us. The Imacon is a very sharp scanner in any case, and needs much less sharpening than most other scanners.

On Interpolation

We never interpolate your files. Your paying for real data direct from the scanner's sensor, not made up pixels. This is why we only scan at the native optical resolutions of the scanner.

If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Resolutions - Fact Vs Fantasy

Even several years ago, you could buy a so-called 4800 PPI film scanner from various makers like Epson, Canon, Microtek etc, which could handle film sizes from 35mm through to large format. So why doesn't everyone scan on one of those?

Because those 'resolution' numbers are sheer fantasy. Sure, the file sizes coming out of those scanners are huge - e.g. 1 gigabyte file from 35mm - wow, that must be a great scan, right? Of course not. They may be huge but they are not optically sharp. They are full of useless pixels containing no real detail.

Resolution is a complex topic - but it boils down, ultimately, to the quality of the optics and the sensor in a particular scanner. And you tend to get what you pay for - and in the case of an Imacon scanner, what we paid for was a razor sharp Rodenstock lens combined with a fantastic Kodak sensor. That's what makes the Imacon so very good - far, far superior to flatbed film scanners, and far superior even to the desktop film scanners from Nikon etc.

The results on our Imacon at just 1600 PPI are better than an Epson flatbed at 4800 PPI!

If you need to make a really large print from our scans, be assured that you can do so because the system is so very sharp - the Imacon can almost always out-resolve photographers. If you take, for instance, a sharp medium format 6 by 6cm shot and blow it up to poster size from an Imacon scan, it will be visibly superior to scans from Epsons, Nikons etc, simply because the optics are so good (never mind the better D-Max, superior tone separation etc).

No matter how big the print you need, the Imacon scan will be better than other options like flatbeds and desktop film scanners as the true ability of the Imacon to resolve detail is far superior to other scanners, even those that claim to have a higher resolution. Try an example scan for yourself and see the difference!

8 bit versus 16 bit scans (a basic explanation)

One of the questions we most often receive results from confusion about the bit-depth of scans. (16 bit scans are also called 48 bit scans because 16 bits are used to describe each of the three colour channels).

8 bit versus 16 bit is a description of how much information the computer is using to represent the range of colours present in an image (or tones in black and white). 8 bits implies that each of the three colours in light (Red, Green, Blue or RGB) are represented by 8 bits of data. In practice this means each of the RGB colours is represented as one of 256 tones, or through combination that your image is represented by some 16 million tones. This is far in excess of the colours/tones available when printing (even on the very best printers), and so 8 bit files were for a long time the industry standard colour depth used for images for printing.

However, as the industry matured Photoshopping images became the norm. Sometimes images were extensively manipulated. This resulted in problems with 8 bit scans, as effects such as 'posterisation' would occur. Essentially this means that when Photoshop is performing its very effective trickery, it would run out of information, and the range of tones in the image would be 'clipped' and the image would no longer contain smooth tonal transitions, resulting in the classic early digital look of colour banding. Hence, 16 bit scans were invented, using 16 bits of information to describe each colour, or giving a tonal range of several billion colours (65335 levels per channel).

We recommend always having your scans done in 16 bit. This gives you the maximum flexibility with your file. However if you're not planning to manipulate your image's colours extensively and want to save a few dollars, 8 bit scans would be the way to go.

Colour Spaces

We scan images by default into the Adobe 1998 RGB colour space as this is industry standard (as defined by the AIPP and ACMP digital guidelines). If you use another colour space, we're happy to directly scan into your preferred colour space.

Print Sizes

300 PPI is the de facto industry standard for printing resolution. When we talk about how big you can print your scans, we simply divide the resolution by 300 to get the number of inches. Hence a 5400 by 3600 pixel scan can be printed to 5400/300 by 3600/300 or 18 by 12 inches. Easy.

If your original image is sharp, then realistically you can drop slightly below 300 PP and get excellent results.

Epson printers realistically produce their best prints with 240PPI or higher, Pegasus machines require 250 PPI, and Lambdas need 200 PPI. So in fact you can generally print significantly larger than we state, without any real visible loss of quality.

Really Big Prints

If you want to produce really, really big prints, you can either use Photoshop interpolation to go higher (do this in small steps for better quality), or more clever software like Genuine Fractals - people have made 50 inch prints from our 35mm scans that look just superb.

Dust and Scratch Removal

On the Imacon Flextight 949

When we scan your negs or transparencies, they are first cleaned using compressed air. The compressed air removes major dust particles, but film often has a slight static charge and some times dust stubbornly sticks to the surface. We DO NOT wipe your photos as the risk of scratching is too great - if your film is dirty (and a lot of film is, take a really good look at your film), we suggest cleaning it with PEC-12 BEFORE sending it to us.

The cleaner you can get your trannies to us, the better, of course! Your storage and transport methods can make a big difference here, as can the quality of processing your lab does. In my personal experience as a professional photographer having film developed in Amsterdam, London, and Australia, I have unfortunately come to the conclusions that many Australian labs have poor quality control by world standards, especially when busy (some of the US and UK labs have amazing quality control, but also admittedly a much bigger market to support them). So even trannies fresh from the lab can be surprisingly grubby under close inspection with a loupe - if you don't complain to your lab, they'll never get better!

On average, when supplied with a clean piece of film to scan, the result is an image that will need just 5 to 10 minutes of final spotting to be made ready for print. If you would like us to do this for you, we charge $50 an hour for this service. Please call us to discuss.

On the Nikon

The Nikon has hardware based automatic dust and scratch removal.

This is the one area that the Nikon really excels in - the Digital ICE3 solution is remarkable and in 99% of all cases will leave you with a completely clean scan requiring absolutely no further spotting work. Really large scratches and fingerprints will not come out so well and will still require some manual work. Contrary to popular web mythology, Digital ICE3 does NOT soften scans (and this is quite easily testable with two side by side scans that are pixel for pixel the same, except for dust!). Immediately around the dust itself there is very slight softening, almost always invisible to the eye under normal viewing, as is to be expected (the scanner interpolates the data where the dust was using the surrounding pixels). Digital ICE3 only works with colour dye based films - i.e. normal colour film like Velvia, Portra, and also chromagenic black and white films. It does not work with true black and white film (and film based on silver rather than dyes).

Negative Scanning

Very thin, very dense, and very contrasty negatives (i.e. over or under developed, or poorly exposed) can be particularly difficult to scan. We will try if requested but the risk of muddy/noisy scans in these cases is yours. Generally speaking, if you can print the neg reasonably, it can be scanned reasonably. Chromagenic film (i.e. C41 process) scans very well and we recommend it.

In short:
Colour from negative film is very tricky, as negative film varies so much. We'll do our best to produce natural and accurate colour, however please be aware some final colour and density balancing will always be required.

In detail:
Colour negative is HIGHLY variable stuff, and it's extremely difficult to get anything resembling 'reliable' (i.e. accurate) colour from a neg (scanned or printed, doesn't matter). The reason for this is, ultimately, the orange mask and the completely variable processing of colour neg that occurs. This is one of the main reasons for transparency film is typically used when colour accuracy is required (and even then, there's more variance between film runs than you might think, which is why ColourChecker charts and clip tests are part of the further arsenal of techniques and equipment required for colour consistency).

When we do a neg scan - we do not completely colour balance files, or aim to colour match proof prints etc. We aim to get maximum detail from the neg and put the image in a position whereby a small amount of editing will get it into very good shape - with around 5% movement or less (i.e. close, not massively out, but not 'bang on' to some arbitrary and subjective judgment). The result is scans from the neg that are likely to be flatter than you expect (deliberately, to retain maximum detail) and close, but not yet perfect colour. The goal is to put you into a good position for fine print work (i.e. maximum detail) rather than to provide perfect colour (since we ultimately have no reference point for that anyway).

In doing this, we start from a base point with respect to a film type. From there, depending on what has been supplied and the conversation we've had, we may or may not tweak the base point slightly in some direction. We don't promise to do this, and we don't consistently do this - in fact, it's generally our policy NOT to do this as it's very subjective and fraught with peril - an adjustment for one image will most likely not suit another, thus 'fixing' one will throw out the next, and before too long, we're in trouble. In the end, you're best off making these adjustments for yourself post-scan. The adjustments are typically minor, and obviously you're the best person to make decisions about your images. It's important to understand that the scans are (deliberately) somewhat unfinished and only one part of the whole process of achieving the fine print.

Especially with negative film, if asked, we would always recommend a 16 bit scan. This is because 16 bit files are more tolerant of colour adjustment, and with neg some final colour balancing is *always* required.

Print Matching

Following on from above, we don't offer a print matching service. We scan what's on the film and aim to give you all the information the film can contain - we're happy to use your prints as a guide but we'll aim to retrieve what's on the film more than we'll aim to produce an exact match of a low quality proof print.

Scanning of Black and White Negative Film

We all know black and white film is very flexible stuff and we can greatly manipulate densities by using different developers, agitation, length of development etc. However, this makes black and white film particularly difficult to scan as what is on it varies so much from film to film, shot to shot. Typically when scanning negative film, a profile is used which shifts the scan towards the best results with the particular colour response of that type of film. However, long experience has taught us that this does not work very will with black and white film - too often the profile makes decisions about D-Max and D-Min that are not appropriate, and so the final scan does not have all the detail it should have.

The solution to this problem is to scan the images using the full dynamic range of the scanner, as RGB colour positives. This results in a scan with all the detail from the original film on it. We then invert the image in Photoshop and remove the slight remaining colour cast that results from the film base not being perfectly neutral. The final result is a neutral scan with all the detail from the original film.

The final results is excellent scans from almost any black and white film that is exposed and developed within reasonable limits. If you've cooked your film (ie over developed) or your film is very thin (under exposed, under developed) then your scans will reflect this, but the Imacon can get a good result from almost any piece of film.

File Naming

Your files will come back with default names like 'untitled12.tif' - these names are created automatically by the scanning software. We are often asked if we can name each scan individually - we're sorry but we can't. This might seem silly to you but the only way we can offer our extremely low prices is by streamlining our processes and concentrating all our efforts on getting you great scans of your film. When you get your scans back, you should check them all, and duplicate the scans to another media for safe keeping and we recommend you use Photoshop, ACDSee or similar to produce a contact sheet at this time.

Rotation

We don't rotate your images - they are scanned in the orientation that the holder fits into the scanner. Again, this is about streamlining our processes and keeping costs down for everyone. It only takes a moment to rotate the images yourself in Photoshop once you're ready to use them, but adds a lot of time to the scanning if we do it then.

The Media We Use (CDs/DVDs)

All media used by Image Science is Taiyo Yuden media - the best quality CD and DVD archival media available (short of the truly specialist survive-a-nuclear-winter $20 a CD type stuff).

If your order fills less than one CD we will burn a CD. There is no charge for this.

If your order fills more than one CD, we will now be burning DVDs be default unless you indicate on your order form that this is not suitable. There is no charge for burning to DVD, no matter how many are required.

If you require CDs and not DVDs, this takes us much more time to do, consequently we must charge $4 per CD to cover the extra media costs and more importantly the extra time it takes us.

Post Scan Workflow

If you're new to Photoshop, or are looking to enhance your Photoshop skills and/or knowledge of fine printing and colour management, you might want to consider our private Sort It All Out course.

A basic workflow for your images after scanning would be:

To prepare the file for printing: