The Art of Scanning Images with Photoshop

To begin, we need to go through our entire image and clean it up as such using the healing brush. This will remove any dust, scratches, or other imperfections from the image. Once we've done this, we can start playing with the levels adjustments and really get the image to look good.

Next, we'll create an adjustment layer by going down to the layers tab on the layers pallet. This allows us to make an adjustment that's not set in stone - we can tweak it later if needed. I prefer to work with these adjustment layers because they give us a lot of control over our image. We can adjust the brightness and contrast, as well as make other changes without affecting the original image.

Now, let's take a closer look at how the curves window works. The curves window gives us access to a histogram that shows us the high end and low end of the image. By adjusting these sliders, we can bring up or down the white point and black point to brighten or darken the image. This is especially useful for images with a lot of contrast - by bringing up the white point, we can make the highlights really white, while bringing down the black point makes the darks darker.

One of the benefits of working with curves layers is that we have a high degree of control over our image. We can click and drag on the curve to create a new point at any time - if we want to get rid of an adjustment, we can simply click and drag it off the histogram. This allows us to make subtle changes to the image without having to worry about messing up the original.

We can also use curves layers to create different effects, such as solarizing an image or creating an S-curve for high contrast images. Solarizing involves bringing the midtone curve up by dragging it towards the top of the histogram - this gives the image a bleached-out look that's often used in black-and-white photography. An S-curve, on the other hand, involves creating two points in the middle of the curve and then adjusting them to create high contrast. This is useful for making images look more dramatic or moody.

After we've made these adjustments, we can usually get a good amount of detail out of our image using the curves layer. However, if we want to take it to the next level, we may need to do some additional work with burning and dodging - techniques that will be covered in a separate podcast episode. But for now, let's just focus on getting this image looking as good as possible.

In the future, we'll cover more advanced scanning techniques, including outputting scans directly from Photoshop or making prints. But for now, let's just enjoy the process of bringing an old film image into the digital age.

As many of our listeners have expressed interest in scanning images that don't require a darkroom - such as family photos or older slides - this technique is perfect for those looking to digitize their old media without having to go through the hassle of developing or printing. And, whether you're working with your own film or someone else's, the end result is always worth it - getting to see images that were once lost in time now brought back to life in a whole new way.

Growing up, I was lucky enough to have family members who were serious about photography, particularly my grandfather. He spent years taking slides and developing them by hand. Until recently, the only way to look at these slides was through a loop or slide projector - but even with those limited options, it was still possible to see the images in a way that felt truly special.

When I started going through old boxes of film, I found all sorts of treasures that I'd never seen before. The quality of the scans is really high - more so than what you can get from a regular slide projector or even some newer digital scanning methods. It's amazing to think about how much detail we're missing out on if we don't scan these old images.

Whether you're working with your own film or doing something for someone else, this technique is perfect for bringing those old images into the 21st century. And, as we'll see in future episodes, there are even more ways to take advantage of scans once they're made - from making prints directly from Photoshop to using them in other creative projects.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com groups artof photography everybody Welcome to The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes and today I want to talk about scanning film Okay so we've talked a lot lately about film uh black and white film qualities developing all that good stuff now when you're done and you have your film developed whether you've done it yourself or you've taken it to the photo lab you kind of have one of two choices you can make a print from that point on or you can digitize it and bring it into the computer which was really kind of cool because it brings you into kind of this hybrid world of using film and then digital techniques uh to work on your prints you can print it out from here or we'll probably do some special podcasts on this later you can actually print to a transparency and then go back into the dark room after using Photoshop to manipulate so it opens up a world of possibilities to you and what I want to show you today is what I use for scanning and I'm going to tell you now this is nothing fancy this is an Epson 4870 that I've used and uh one of the things you can you can see on here is uh I'll go ahead and open the lid for you here uh this is a transparency scanner so one of the things you're going to have to look for if you want to do film is a a scanner that has the ability to do transparencies and you can see that the lid has basically another track in here that tracks along with the scanning sensor that project projects light so what it does is it puts light through the film uh as you're as you're going and doing your scanning okay so when you buy one of these scanners and this is not the latest and greatest by any stretch of the imagination this is a basic flatbed scanner and not very current one at that they're some newer models that epson's produced um the other thing that these come with are a series of holders and it comes with four uh one's already in there that does 4x5 transparency um this is one that'll hold medium format and you basically you can put three strips in there and it's got a little series of guides that'll lock that down this one is for putting slides into so if you have your uh chrome slide mounted you can just drop those on there really easy to use and then finally there's one for 35 mm and basically what you want to do is clip your film down the transparency adapter um basically has a frame that will hold your film flat while you're getting ready to scan so let's go ahead and take a look at uh what happens when you scan now one thing I want to tell you here too is uh you're going to need to get um two things dust is your enemy and you're basically with with any kind of film you're dealing with something that's on a very microscopic level and you're blowing it up to a larger scale and so there's all kinds of little things especially if you have pets uh you might have dust and hair in the air that you cannot see or You don't notice and all of a sudden it's real blotchy on your film so the two things that well the one thing that I try to do right up front ahead of time is keep the scanner as clean as possible and I clean it every time I open that lid and put film down on it okay so that's that's kind of the first rule of thumb there is to just try it it saves so much time yes you can go out I'm going to show you how to BL blotch out dust um but you know if you have too much of that it just becomes too burdensome and a waste of your time to do in Photoshop anyway so um the first thing I would do is get a can of compressed air and use that for blowing off your negatives you don't want to touch them and you don't want to wipe the negatives but you can hit them with air and try to get some of that dust off so can of compressed air really helps with that uh then two things I use on the scanner itself one the compressed air but even better than that what I found just at the grocery store if you buy um uh some of the Swiffer dust wipes uh Swiffer makes these wonderful things you can mop your floor with but they make just some dust wipes too which basically are these sheets that they're a little thicker than than tissue uh like Kleenex or something like that but they kind of have they're engineered so they kind of pick up dust really easily and the dust kind of sticks to the sheet and not the surface that you're dusting those really help you want to make sure though that you don't get one that has a liquid treatment in it of any kind cuz you don't want to start putting that on the glass but just the straight up uh Swiffer dust wipes really help with that so let's go ahead and uh put some film on here and let's take a look at uh some actual scanning okay so let's take a look at the Epson scan software that's going to enable us to scan our image now um there's several different modes you can run this in um I'm running it in professional mode oh one other thing I want to mention is uh there's two ways you can run this application you can run it either as a standalone application which is what we're doing now or you can run it as a plugin for Photoshop and the plugin's great if you're just going to scan an image and immediately start editing I'm running this as a standalone because you know you might want to scan multiple images that are on the flat bed and then IM and then edit them afterwards uh but anyway we're running this as a standalone right now and uh the mode right now that I've selected is professional mode because I want to show you how to dig into the details um if you run it in full auto you don't have any of these options okay the first thing we're going to look at is under original here for the document type I want to make sure I've selected film reflective is if you're scanning just a tear sheet or a print or a piece of paper paper or something like that but we want it lit from behind so I'm going to select film and the film type I am doing a black and white negative I have a 4x5 negative on here that I'm going to scan it's a uh macroshot of a sunflower and uh underneath it is black and white so I'm going to select 16bit Grays scale let's open this for a second and see what's in here you do have different options I can run color smoothing I really don't ever do this but uh you can run 16bit gray scale 8 bit gray scale and then 24 and 48 bit color the more bits you have in your image the more color information is in there or or in our case the more grayscale information so I'm going to I want the most information that I can get about these various values in my image so I'm going to select 16bit you can certainly do 8 bit but uh for high quality printing stuff like that you want more more data in the image and then the next is going to be the resolution now this is the DPI or dots per inch and the document size here and so what I want to do first is let's go ahead and click the preview button and this is going to scan a preview that we can work with off the flatbed it's not quite a high resolution but it's enough to where you can do some tweaks so I'm I'm going to go ahead the other thing you want to do is make sure thumbnail is deselected if you're using the Epson uh thumbnail enables Auto thumbnails and we don't want that so let's go ahead and hit preview and we're going to create our own thumbnail so I'm going to hit that it's going to say scan in progress and we'll bump ahead a little bit here okay so what we're going to do here is we're getting a preview scan of everything that's on the flatbed right now and I actually have two negatives loaded up and we're going to scan one of them I'm going show you how that's done the first thing you want to do is crop off the area that you want scanned for this particular image file and I'm going to take this top image this macro the sunflare here and as I hover over the image you can see that I get a plus symbol here for the cursor and if I just click and drag in one of the corners I kind of uh section off a thumbnail so this is the area that it's actually going to scan for the file and you can tweak this if you hold your cursor over the top so you can get right up to the edge if that's what you want to do or you can take a crop of the image doesn't make much difference we'll go ahead and size this out here okay so now we're ready to do a little bit of work here on the image okay first of all let's go back over to the resolution right now you can see my document size is it's roughly oh it's roughly it's a little under 4x5 this is a 4 in x 5 in negative and the scan area is a little bit smaller and how many what is the resolution I want for a essentially a 4X 4.67 by 3.65 in image and what we're doing is we're taking a resolution of 800 pixels okay now real quick at the bottom here I want to show you what the resolution is looking like at the bottom of this it says 300 3,736 pixels by this is the length and the width of the image here and the estimated file size it's going to take up now in digital cameras are usually measured in what are called megapixels and If I multiply uh these two numbers together it gives me my total pixels for the image and and that for million pixels is so if you have a 6 megapixel camera it's 6 million pixels that you're getting in the image so the higher I go the more megapixels I have the lower I go the fewer now usually what I do is I try to not I mean it takes a lot of storage space to store these images once you're done so I typically with all my scans from my workflow try to go with an 8x10 image unless for whatever weird reason I need to go bigger like if I'm doing a show and I need some prints done and I'm going to print them from a printer um then I will rescan specifically for those uses but for most uses I just go for an 8 by10 that I could print out at any given time now 800 uh DPI will give me that for 4x5 negative let's open this for a second I can obviously go way up to uh 12,800 uh and which is going to be huge uh and then you're also testing the limits of your scanner and how because it's magnifying you know how much detail uh the lens in the scanner can pick up so generally for an 8x10 print I will go with 800 DPI for a 4x5 negative if I'm scanning medium format film I would bump this up to 12200 because it's a little bit smaller and then 35 mm is smaller than that so I'll go 2400 for a 35 mm negative from a 35mm camera so these are 4x5 so they're pretty big negatives uh so let's go ahead and select 8800 for that and uh the next the next stuff I don't need to worry about as much by default usually unsharp mask is turned on make sure that's off I found that if your negative is done correctly um even if you're using a hogga if you have if you have a proper exposure your negatives are developed correctly and they're clean you shouldn't need a whole lot of sharpening and if you do you can do that from inside a photo editor like Photoshop anyway so I typically don't like to do that on the scan anything you do on the scan really can't be undone later so I try to keep this kind of neutral uh so it gives me more options down the road in Photoshop now one last thing I'm going to do here before I scan is I want play with the histogram a little bit I'm going to show you how to read that if you click here on this levels histogram indicator it'll bring up a contextual window here and you can see that it gives us a little histogram and this is basically how to read the levels of Light Within the image now this is a grayscale image we'll do a separate thing on color uh another time uh but essentially you can see here that I have these little triangles down here and these represent the low point the midpoint and the the Highlight point and if I move these from left to right you can see that if I bring this up it it raises the black point and I lose more detail making the image or the Black Point darker um and if I bring it back here it makes it kind of Muddy looking and flat and same with the Highlight the more I bring this in the brighter the image gets the more I start blowing out highlights and the less that I do it pretty much takes it down to Black because you have no white point so typically what you want to do is I bring these Down To The Ends Here of you can see the curve on the histogram here and this basically just says make sure that that the darkest point in the image is is the black point and the brightest point in the images is the white point and then you can also adjust the mid to tones here and if I bring these back and forth you can see at this point once you've established your high and low point that this kind of just kind of um adjusts the curve in the middle of how much leaning more towards the dark side or leaning more towards the light side so what I typically look for in here is detail so you can see all this detail in the sunflower here I want to be able to get that back if I need to later in the image so I don't want to make that too dark I also don't want to make it too bright cuz you see I start losing much difference in tonal values so I'll probably you know The Middle's fine but you might look and see if you can just bring a little bit more detail cuz we can adjust this in Photoshop later so this is fairly neutral I've got good detail my my white point is set my blacko is set and I'm ready to scan uh again we can tweak this further later and we will so let's go ahead and bring a scan in and to do that we're just simply going to click scan okay so we have now scanned our image and brought it into Photoshop here and there's a couple things that I want to do with this um okay first of all you probably don't have a point of reference um because this is such a closeup image but I do need to rotate and flip the image because it is um not the correct orientation that I shot it at so first thing I'm going to do is go under image and we're going to say rotate canvas and I'm going to say 90° counterclockwise and this will bring it in as such and this is about where I want my image to be okay so now that I've done that the next thing you want to do here is uh I mentioned dust is a problem earlier and what we need to do is is basically get some dust off of the image the other thing you can do here let me show you real quick if I bring this over a little bit you can see that up close to the edge it's not quite cropped real tight so you might want to do some cropping adjustments too that that certainly uh can help you out there let's make this a little smaller here and I'll go ahead and crop this image out a little bit goad and grab the crop tool and let's say we're going to bring it about here go ahead and double click and we have a cropped image of our sunflower here okay now the next thing I need to do is look for dust okay this is typically in my workflow what I do and if we zoom in on this image and get it up to full 100% here you can see that on some of these petals see these little white specks these are all dust marks and it's obviously more important um to try to get the scanner as clean as possible you'll have fewer of these later um if you have a dirty scanner you're going to have a lot more work to do in Photoshop but let me show you real quick how I will zap these little little uh dust pieces you'll never get these totally off your image uh you'll always have a few so this is the first thing I do once I've scan in the image and cropped it okay what we're going to do is I'm going to use the healing tool here which is this little Band-Aid over in the corner now this works if you're an old school Photoshop user um we used to only have the Clone tool and you used to have to clone stuff out and basically it gives you a brush see this large Circle here and if I hold down the option key on the keyboard it turns into a little Target and what I can do is is just click and select a point to sample from and if I'm using the Clone tool it will copy that sample wherever I start painting but we're using the healing brush tool and so what it does is it works kind of like the Clone tool but what it does is it really averages out a difference between the sampled area and the Highlight area or excuse me the painting area which is nice because rather than just do a hard clone over the top it kind of splits the difference between the two and it's really great for getting out dust so typically what I'll do is just go around the image and select an area and just paint over it real lightly now I use a waycom pen which makes this really easy because it's pressure sensitive the harder I press down the more area it's going to cover so I can do this really lightly and notice I just I I sample close to where I'm going to grab it from and you don't have to resample all the time if you're zapping dust in the same area so I'll just kind of keep coming around here and we'll bring these little dust specks out and uh it's looking a little better okay so you want to go through your entire image and do this you can see that I have some water marks on here because this was not a real clean operation here when I I didn't let it dry long enough before I put on the scanner basically is what happens but they they also will you can take those out so any junk on your film because we've we've uh enlarged this to such a degree um you can see that um we have a little bit clamp to do okay so you would want to go through your entire image and clean it up as such using the healing brush okay the next thing I'm going to do here is let's go ahead and now we can start playing with the levels adjustments and really get this image to to look good remember I've kind of done this uh we scanned it in pretty neutral uh sorry um and so what I want to do here is we're going to go down on the layers tab here on the layers pallet and I'm going to do an adjustment layer now this allows us to make an adjustment and it's not set in stone we can we can tweak that adjustment layer that's why I prefer to work with these than than directly altering the image we're going to do I like to work with curves on this I'm going to show you how this works okay the curves window here gives you kind of you can see a histogram below and basically here's the the the high end and the low end are marked off so here's your white point up here your dark ends down here this is reversed in a color image uh but what I can do here is basically adjust these sliders you can do automatic on here but you can see if I bring up the white point now really brings it up so those highlights really are white okay so let's deselect preview so you can see the difference there so we took a pretty muddy gray image and brighten it up same with the black point we're going to bring this down so that really makes the darks dark so you can see I have a lot more control in here already because we have a high-rise image that we're working with not just that little preview that the scanner software does and then if you want to put a midpoint in here like you do with your levels here's what's nice about a curves layer is I just click on the line and I drag and it creates a point I can bring it up and I can create multiple points on here if I really want to do something crazy with the image kind of make it look solarized at that point but I don't if you want to get rid of one just click and drag and take it off the histogram and it will make it so so if I bring this curve in towards the bottom it brightens up the image because it brings the midtone curve up or I can darken that by bringing it down so if I want kind of more of a moody picture I can do that this way or if I bring it up I can get more detail in the middle of that sunflower you can also create what's called an S curve where if I create an S here it gives it a high contrast so the whites are real white and the darks are real dark it's what's typically called an S curve it requires two points in the middle so anyway this is more or less how you can treat your image and then from here I will typically do a little bit of work uh I will do a little bit bit of burning and dodging which we'll cover in a separate podcast later but basically just get this as close as I can with using the curves and then I can go treat individual parts of the image and really get a lot of the same control over this image that I would have if I were in a dark room so anyway uh I hope that helps this is basically how you get an image scanned into Photoshop okay so that's the ins and outs of scanning I know this was a pretty detailed episode there's a lot of information here but a lot of you in the flicker forms have expressed a lot of interest in uh specifically scanning even some of you who don't develop your own film and I think that a lot of us have old family negatives and things that predate a lot of the digital stuff that we would like to have scanned and it's really kind of cool too because like when I was growing up uh my parents and grandparents they I one of my grandfathers was particularly into photography and he was real serious about shooting slides well up until recently the only way to look at slides was either through a loop or a slide projector and so you know in going through old box as a film there's there's a lot of kind of treasure that you find uh that you've never even either seen or not seen uh as detailed as what you can get out of a scan so uh whether you're doing your own stuff or you're doing something for somebody else or old family foes this is a really fun way to go uh and we'll talk more in the future about some some techniques that you can do once you have Scan film uh where you can output it back out and get in the dark room again if you're interested or you can make prints directly from Photoshop so anyway but that's all for another time this has been the Art of Photography and thanks for watchingjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com groups artof photography everybody Welcome to The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes and today I want to talk about scanning film Okay so we've talked a lot lately about film uh black and white film qualities developing all that good stuff now when you're done and you have your film developed whether you've done it yourself or you've taken it to the photo lab you kind of have one of two choices you can make a print from that point on or you can digitize it and bring it into the computer which was really kind of cool because it brings you into kind of this hybrid world of using film and then digital techniques uh to work on your prints you can print it out from here or we'll probably do some special podcasts on this later you can actually print to a transparency and then go back into the dark room after using Photoshop to manipulate so it opens up a world of possibilities to you and what I want to show you today is what I use for scanning and I'm going to tell you now this is nothing fancy this is an Epson 4870 that I've used and uh one of the things you can you can see on here is uh I'll go ahead and open the lid for you here uh this is a transparency scanner so one of the things you're going to have to look for if you want to do film is a a scanner that has the ability to do transparencies and you can see that the lid has basically another track in here that tracks along with the scanning sensor that project projects light so what it does is it puts light through the film uh as you're as you're going and doing your scanning okay so when you buy one of these scanners and this is not the latest and greatest by any stretch of the imagination this is a basic flatbed scanner and not very current one at that they're some newer models that epson's produced um the other thing that these come with are a series of holders and it comes with four uh one's already in there that does 4x5 transparency um this is one that'll hold medium format and you basically you can put three strips in there and it's got a little series of guides that'll lock that down this one is for putting slides into so if you have your uh chrome slide mounted you can just drop those on there really easy to use and then finally there's one for 35 mm and basically what you want to do is clip your film down the transparency adapter um basically has a frame that will hold your film flat while you're getting ready to scan so let's go ahead and take a look at uh what happens when you scan now one thing I want to tell you here too is uh you're going to need to get um two things dust is your enemy and you're basically with with any kind of film you're dealing with something that's on a very microscopic level and you're blowing it up to a larger scale and so there's all kinds of little things especially if you have pets uh you might have dust and hair in the air that you cannot see or You don't notice and all of a sudden it's real blotchy on your film so the two things that well the one thing that I try to do right up front ahead of time is keep the scanner as clean as possible and I clean it every time I open that lid and put film down on it okay so that's that's kind of the first rule of thumb there is to just try it it saves so much time yes you can go out I'm going to show you how to BL blotch out dust um but you know if you have too much of that it just becomes too burdensome and a waste of your time to do in Photoshop anyway so um the first thing I would do is get a can of compressed air and use that for blowing off your negatives you don't want to touch them and you don't want to wipe the negatives but you can hit them with air and try to get some of that dust off so can of compressed air really helps with that uh then two things I use on the scanner itself one the compressed air but even better than that what I found just at the grocery store if you buy um uh some of the Swiffer dust wipes uh Swiffer makes these wonderful things you can mop your floor with but they make just some dust wipes too which basically are these sheets that they're a little thicker than than tissue uh like Kleenex or something like that but they kind of have they're engineered so they kind of pick up dust really easily and the dust kind of sticks to the sheet and not the surface that you're dusting those really help you want to make sure though that you don't get one that has a liquid treatment in it of any kind cuz you don't want to start putting that on the glass but just the straight up uh Swiffer dust wipes really help with that so let's go ahead and uh put some film on here and let's take a look at uh some actual scanning okay so let's take a look at the Epson scan software that's going to enable us to scan our image now um there's several different modes you can run this in um I'm running it in professional mode oh one other thing I want to mention is uh there's two ways you can run this application you can run it either as a standalone application which is what we're doing now or you can run it as a plugin for Photoshop and the plugin's great if you're just going to scan an image and immediately start editing I'm running this as a standalone because you know you might want to scan multiple images that are on the flat bed and then IM and then edit them afterwards uh but anyway we're running this as a standalone right now and uh the mode right now that I've selected is professional mode because I want to show you how to dig into the details um if you run it in full auto you don't have any of these options okay the first thing we're going to look at is under original here for the document type I want to make sure I've selected film reflective is if you're scanning just a tear sheet or a print or a piece of paper paper or something like that but we want it lit from behind so I'm going to select film and the film type I am doing a black and white negative I have a 4x5 negative on here that I'm going to scan it's a uh macroshot of a sunflower and uh underneath it is black and white so I'm going to select 16bit Grays scale let's open this for a second and see what's in here you do have different options I can run color smoothing I really don't ever do this but uh you can run 16bit gray scale 8 bit gray scale and then 24 and 48 bit color the more bits you have in your image the more color information is in there or or in our case the more grayscale information so I'm going to I want the most information that I can get about these various values in my image so I'm going to select 16bit you can certainly do 8 bit but uh for high quality printing stuff like that you want more more data in the image and then the next is going to be the resolution now this is the DPI or dots per inch and the document size here and so what I want to do first is let's go ahead and click the preview button and this is going to scan a preview that we can work with off the flatbed it's not quite a high resolution but it's enough to where you can do some tweaks so I'm I'm going to go ahead the other thing you want to do is make sure thumbnail is deselected if you're using the Epson uh thumbnail enables Auto thumbnails and we don't want that so let's go ahead and hit preview and we're going to create our own thumbnail so I'm going to hit that it's going to say scan in progress and we'll bump ahead a little bit here okay so what we're going to do here is we're getting a preview scan of everything that's on the flatbed right now and I actually have two negatives loaded up and we're going to scan one of them I'm going show you how that's done the first thing you want to do is crop off the area that you want scanned for this particular image file and I'm going to take this top image this macro the sunflare here and as I hover over the image you can see that I get a plus symbol here for the cursor and if I just click and drag in one of the corners I kind of uh section off a thumbnail so this is the area that it's actually going to scan for the file and you can tweak this if you hold your cursor over the top so you can get right up to the edge if that's what you want to do or you can take a crop of the image doesn't make much difference we'll go ahead and size this out here okay so now we're ready to do a little bit of work here on the image okay first of all let's go back over to the resolution right now you can see my document size is it's roughly oh it's roughly it's a little under 4x5 this is a 4 in x 5 in negative and the scan area is a little bit smaller and how many what is the resolution I want for a essentially a 4X 4.67 by 3.65 in image and what we're doing is we're taking a resolution of 800 pixels okay now real quick at the bottom here I want to show you what the resolution is looking like at the bottom of this it says 300 3,736 pixels by this is the length and the width of the image here and the estimated file size it's going to take up now in digital cameras are usually measured in what are called megapixels and If I multiply uh these two numbers together it gives me my total pixels for the image and and that for million pixels is so if you have a 6 megapixel camera it's 6 million pixels that you're getting in the image so the higher I go the more megapixels I have the lower I go the fewer now usually what I do is I try to not I mean it takes a lot of storage space to store these images once you're done so I typically with all my scans from my workflow try to go with an 8x10 image unless for whatever weird reason I need to go bigger like if I'm doing a show and I need some prints done and I'm going to print them from a printer um then I will rescan specifically for those uses but for most uses I just go for an 8 by10 that I could print out at any given time now 800 uh DPI will give me that for 4x5 negative let's open this for a second I can obviously go way up to uh 12,800 uh and which is going to be huge uh and then you're also testing the limits of your scanner and how because it's magnifying you know how much detail uh the lens in the scanner can pick up so generally for an 8x10 print I will go with 800 DPI for a 4x5 negative if I'm scanning medium format film I would bump this up to 12200 because it's a little bit smaller and then 35 mm is smaller than that so I'll go 2400 for a 35 mm negative from a 35mm camera so these are 4x5 so they're pretty big negatives uh so let's go ahead and select 8800 for that and uh the next the next stuff I don't need to worry about as much by default usually unsharp mask is turned on make sure that's off I found that if your negative is done correctly um even if you're using a hogga if you have if you have a proper exposure your negatives are developed correctly and they're clean you shouldn't need a whole lot of sharpening and if you do you can do that from inside a photo editor like Photoshop anyway so I typically don't like to do that on the scan anything you do on the scan really can't be undone later so I try to keep this kind of neutral uh so it gives me more options down the road in Photoshop now one last thing I'm going to do here before I scan is I want play with the histogram a little bit I'm going to show you how to read that if you click here on this levels histogram indicator it'll bring up a contextual window here and you can see that it gives us a little histogram and this is basically how to read the levels of Light Within the image now this is a grayscale image we'll do a separate thing on color uh another time uh but essentially you can see here that I have these little triangles down here and these represent the low point the midpoint and the the Highlight point and if I move these from left to right you can see that if I bring this up it it raises the black point and I lose more detail making the image or the Black Point darker um and if I bring it back here it makes it kind of Muddy looking and flat and same with the Highlight the more I bring this in the brighter the image gets the more I start blowing out highlights and the less that I do it pretty much takes it down to Black because you have no white point so typically what you want to do is I bring these Down To The Ends Here of you can see the curve on the histogram here and this basically just says make sure that that the darkest point in the image is is the black point and the brightest point in the images is the white point and then you can also adjust the mid to tones here and if I bring these back and forth you can see at this point once you've established your high and low point that this kind of just kind of um adjusts the curve in the middle of how much leaning more towards the dark side or leaning more towards the light side so what I typically look for in here is detail so you can see all this detail in the sunflower here I want to be able to get that back if I need to later in the image so I don't want to make that too dark I also don't want to make it too bright cuz you see I start losing much difference in tonal values so I'll probably you know The Middle's fine but you might look and see if you can just bring a little bit more detail cuz we can adjust this in Photoshop later so this is fairly neutral I've got good detail my my white point is set my blacko is set and I'm ready to scan uh again we can tweak this further later and we will so let's go ahead and bring a scan in and to do that we're just simply going to click scan okay so we have now scanned our image and brought it into Photoshop here and there's a couple things that I want to do with this um okay first of all you probably don't have a point of reference um because this is such a closeup image but I do need to rotate and flip the image because it is um not the correct orientation that I shot it at so first thing I'm going to do is go under image and we're going to say rotate canvas and I'm going to say 90° counterclockwise and this will bring it in as such and this is about where I want my image to be okay so now that I've done that the next thing you want to do here is uh I mentioned dust is a problem earlier and what we need to do is is basically get some dust off of the image the other thing you can do here let me show you real quick if I bring this over a little bit you can see that up close to the edge it's not quite cropped real tight so you might want to do some cropping adjustments too that that certainly uh can help you out there let's make this a little smaller here and I'll go ahead and crop this image out a little bit goad and grab the crop tool and let's say we're going to bring it about here go ahead and double click and we have a cropped image of our sunflower here okay now the next thing I need to do is look for dust okay this is typically in my workflow what I do and if we zoom in on this image and get it up to full 100% here you can see that on some of these petals see these little white specks these are all dust marks and it's obviously more important um to try to get the scanner as clean as possible you'll have fewer of these later um if you have a dirty scanner you're going to have a lot more work to do in Photoshop but let me show you real quick how I will zap these little little uh dust pieces you'll never get these totally off your image uh you'll always have a few so this is the first thing I do once I've scan in the image and cropped it okay what we're going to do is I'm going to use the healing tool here which is this little Band-Aid over in the corner now this works if you're an old school Photoshop user um we used to only have the Clone tool and you used to have to clone stuff out and basically it gives you a brush see this large Circle here and if I hold down the option key on the keyboard it turns into a little Target and what I can do is is just click and select a point to sample from and if I'm using the Clone tool it will copy that sample wherever I start painting but we're using the healing brush tool and so what it does is it works kind of like the Clone tool but what it does is it really averages out a difference between the sampled area and the Highlight area or excuse me the painting area which is nice because rather than just do a hard clone over the top it kind of splits the difference between the two and it's really great for getting out dust so typically what I'll do is just go around the image and select an area and just paint over it real lightly now I use a waycom pen which makes this really easy because it's pressure sensitive the harder I press down the more area it's going to cover so I can do this really lightly and notice I just I I sample close to where I'm going to grab it from and you don't have to resample all the time if you're zapping dust in the same area so I'll just kind of keep coming around here and we'll bring these little dust specks out and uh it's looking a little better okay so you want to go through your entire image and do this you can see that I have some water marks on here because this was not a real clean operation here when I I didn't let it dry long enough before I put on the scanner basically is what happens but they they also will you can take those out so any junk on your film because we've we've uh enlarged this to such a degree um you can see that um we have a little bit clamp to do okay so you would want to go through your entire image and clean it up as such using the healing brush okay the next thing I'm going to do here is let's go ahead and now we can start playing with the levels adjustments and really get this image to to look good remember I've kind of done this uh we scanned it in pretty neutral uh sorry um and so what I want to do here is we're going to go down on the layers tab here on the layers pallet and I'm going to do an adjustment layer now this allows us to make an adjustment and it's not set in stone we can we can tweak that adjustment layer that's why I prefer to work with these than than directly altering the image we're going to do I like to work with curves on this I'm going to show you how this works okay the curves window here gives you kind of you can see a histogram below and basically here's the the the high end and the low end are marked off so here's your white point up here your dark ends down here this is reversed in a color image uh but what I can do here is basically adjust these sliders you can do automatic on here but you can see if I bring up the white point now really brings it up so those highlights really are white okay so let's deselect preview so you can see the difference there so we took a pretty muddy gray image and brighten it up same with the black point we're going to bring this down so that really makes the darks dark so you can see I have a lot more control in here already because we have a high-rise image that we're working with not just that little preview that the scanner software does and then if you want to put a midpoint in here like you do with your levels here's what's nice about a curves layer is I just click on the line and I drag and it creates a point I can bring it up and I can create multiple points on here if I really want to do something crazy with the image kind of make it look solarized at that point but I don't if you want to get rid of one just click and drag and take it off the histogram and it will make it so so if I bring this curve in towards the bottom it brightens up the image because it brings the midtone curve up or I can darken that by bringing it down so if I want kind of more of a moody picture I can do that this way or if I bring it up I can get more detail in the middle of that sunflower you can also create what's called an S curve where if I create an S here it gives it a high contrast so the whites are real white and the darks are real dark it's what's typically called an S curve it requires two points in the middle so anyway this is more or less how you can treat your image and then from here I will typically do a little bit of work uh I will do a little bit bit of burning and dodging which we'll cover in a separate podcast later but basically just get this as close as I can with using the curves and then I can go treat individual parts of the image and really get a lot of the same control over this image that I would have if I were in a dark room so anyway uh I hope that helps this is basically how you get an image scanned into Photoshop okay so that's the ins and outs of scanning I know this was a pretty detailed episode there's a lot of information here but a lot of you in the flicker forms have expressed a lot of interest in uh specifically scanning even some of you who don't develop your own film and I think that a lot of us have old family negatives and things that predate a lot of the digital stuff that we would like to have scanned and it's really kind of cool too because like when I was growing up uh my parents and grandparents they I one of my grandfathers was particularly into photography and he was real serious about shooting slides well up until recently the only way to look at slides was either through a loop or a slide projector and so you know in going through old box as a film there's there's a lot of kind of treasure that you find uh that you've never even either seen or not seen uh as detailed as what you can get out of a scan so uh whether you're doing your own stuff or you're doing something for somebody else or old family foes this is a really fun way to go uh and we'll talk more in the future about some some techniques that you can do once you have Scan film uh where you can output it back out and get in the dark room again if you're interested or you can make prints directly from Photoshop so anyway but that's all for another time this has been the Art of Photography and thanks for watching\n"