The photos on this site were shot on 35 mm Plus X film and scanned in a Nikon Cool Scan V which I bought from Amazon.com for about $600 for this project. Although I found the software that came with the scanner a little clumsy, I would recommend it to anyone wanting to digitally archive their negatives and slides.

The scanner's maximum resolution is 4,000 dpi which results in a 35mm full frame with dimensions of 3946 x 5959 pixels and a file size of about 33 mb in TIFF format or about a 25 mb file in JPG format with the lowest level compression.  The photo below show a full frame scan of a 35mm Plus X negative with the scanner's aperture extending into the space between the images on the film strip. The scanner does not allow you to scan into the sprocket area of the negatives.  Below it is a crop of Jack's right eye, keeping the same pixel size as on the original 4,000 dpi scan.

For my purposes, I do not need such a large pixel dimension so I kept the scans to about 1600 x 330 which resulted in a JPG file size of about 330 kb with high image quality compression. Of course for this web site the scans were resized much small with the photos with a horizontal orientation having a horizontal pixel dimension of 750 px and photos with a vertical orientation resized to have a 450 px horizontal dimension.

The typical scan time was about 1:30 minutes per frame.

Although I had the scanner set for black and white scans, most of the images came out with a color cast. So I desaturated them in Photoshop using the direct method of Image > Destaurate rather then other methods which result in  histogramic differences. Then, I put a little color back in them to taste to keep them from have a dead look. I usually did this in Color Balance throwing the midtones over to yellow and giving  the shadow tones a little blue. Sometime I would also give the midtones a touch of red to keep them from looking green.

I scanned in RGB mode rather then grayscale because the RGB scans resulted in a better histogram.

I did not use the scanner's software to make adjustments to the images, preferring instead to make any needed adjustments to the tonality using Levels and Curves in Photoshop. In the few times when I did use the unsharp mask filter, I tried to do so with a light hand.

Back in the dark ages of film photography, I had a lot of trouble with dust on the negatives during the drying process. I have tried some pretty aggressive techniques to remove it, but none have worked. After more than 30 years, the dust seems to be permanently embedded in the emulation and even on the film base side. Unfortunately, the scanner's ICE technology, which works magic on scratches and dust on color negatives, does not work on black and white film.

Take me home.