Scanned slides, MP comparison?

[burtharrris]

I'm bridging the gap between digital and filim here. I have a lot of Velvia 50 and E100G slides that I'm scanning in as tiffs. They're coming in at around 50 megabytes each. When I take my Raws from a 6.0 MP Pentax and make them tiffs, they come in at around 17 megabytes. By shooting slides and scanning, am I using the equivalent of a 12 MP camera? Or do I lose quality with grain? Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks!!

 

[Alex_B]

I'm bridging the gap between digital and filim here. I have a lot of Velvia 50 and E100G slides that I'm scanning in as tiffs. They're coming in at around 50 megabytes each. When I take my Raws from a 6.0 MP Pentax and make them tiffs, they come in at around 17 megabytes. By shooting slides and scanning, am I using the equivalent of a 12 MP camera? Or do I lose quality with grain? Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks!!

From my personal experience, fine grain film like Velvia might come close to 10to12-ish MP, it also depends on the scanner you use. Often scanner focus ruins some of the resolution which is in the slides.

But often limits are set by the lenses ... not the grain or the MP. Both on my Velvia scans from 35mm and on my 13 MP images from my digital camera I can clearly see the flaws and weaknesses of my lenses (which I consider fairly good lenses).

 

[burtharrris]

Interesting. I imagine the Pentax kit lens (18-55) doesn't have top notch quality. I am confident in my Canon 1.8 mk1.

I'm using a Nikon Coolscan, how is the focusing on this particular scanner?

 

[Alex_B]

Interesting. I imagine the Pentax kit lens (18-55) doesn't have top notch quality. I am confident in my Canon 1.8 mk1.

I'm using a Nikon Coolscan, how is the focusing on this particular scanner?

from my experience the best desktopscanners available. especially the recent series. it won't match drumscans of course.
With my Coolscan focussing was an issue, and bending of the slide in the frame (that was slides with no glass framing).

you will need postprocessing, such as sharpening in PS, else images will apear rather soft. The outcome will also depend on your PS-sharpening skills then.

some advice: I would switch off the grain reduction of the scanner software, it does a lousy job compared to stand-alone software such as neatimage.

All in all results with the coolscan and velvia are nice, but producing a digital image takes a considerable amount of extra work compared to purely digital.

 

[burtharrris]

What command do you recommend to sharpen? Unsharp mask? Smart sharpen?

 

[Alex_B]

What command do you recommend to sharpen? Unsharp mask? Smart sharpen?

if I got lots of time i use the unsharpen mask and play around with it alot.

if i am in a hurry, or it is many images, then i use plain "sharpen" and then reduce the effect by setting the sharpening layer opacity until the artifacts disappear but it still looks fairly sharp.

smart sharpen seems great, but I only have CS2 since a couple of weeks ago, so I did not seriously dare to try smart sharpen yet