Re Dmerger's:
Now, all of a sudden we have a guy who registers on this web site on January 11, 2011, and the very next day posts a question about scanning Kodachrome. Coincidence?As that statement is a personal reference to me, Guy Burns, 99 Leith Rd, Tasmania, 03 6428 2976 (I never use a pseudonym on any forum/website) I'll let readers decide if my first post was a coincidence. And I should rebut the inference linking me to SilverFast.
In early December 2010, I began the process of slide scanning, with the aim of converting my 3-screen audiovisuals to HD format. It has been a long term aim for about ten years. I have a mob of slides locked up in about a dozen slideshows, produced since 1983. As slides, the shows were presented at a local theatre, but now that I consider digital images to be comparable to slides, my aim is to convert them to HD and use the Barco DP-2000 projector (
http://www.barco.com/en/digitalcinema/product/1805) at the theatre to show new digital versions of my audiovisuals.
I assumed the slide scanning would be the easy part. I thought the aesthetic aspect of converting images with a 4.5:1 aspect ratio to 16:9 would be the difficult part. And I was pretty sure that matching the colour and contrast of an image on my monitor to that of the Barco would be quite a challenge. Well, I'm stuck on step one. I still don't know how to scan slides acceptably. As well as using my Coolscan, I'm testing a friend's Plustek, a Canon flatbed, and a Nikon D700. And I'm comparing Vuescan, SilverFast and NikonScan.
One Month Before The CoincidenceTwo mates reckoned photographing the images with a Nikon D700, macro lens, barrel and slide attachment was the way to go. Reasonable results now, but it started off poorly. Here's my thread from Dec 12:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1021&message=37163593Three Weeks Before The CoincidenceWith the Coolscan, I couldn't understand how it could give such outstanding results for certain slides, results that could not be replicated in Photoshop. Here's my post from Dec 16:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/766773?tstart=0Two Days After The CoincidenceI have no connection with SilverFast and I am not enamoured by its capabilities. Initial testing revealed serious flaws in it's handling of infrared dust removal, and it's non-infrared dust removal is woeful (as to be expected). Several articles on Wikipedia reference SilverKeeper, and I've challenged, and am just about to remove, some of them and provide references with more authority (see S
tops/Density Range near the bottom of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kodachrome)
I want the best digital images from my slides, and at this stage I have no biases. I'm in a pure testing phase which may last several months. I can say, however, that at the moment SilverFast is not high on my list of software. But that might change.