Scan Once, Re-purpose Many Times

We suggest you scan once and re-purpose many times. In practical terms this means you should scan your film to accommodate the largest size print or output you anticipate you’ll need at 300 DPI. That way you’ll never have to re-scan your image again.

You can’t make a big print from a small file, however, you can always make a small print from a big file because smaller prints require less resolution.
Here’s an example of how to estimate the file size of a scan when you need both a small and big output. You can also do the calculations in the Image Size drop down menu in Photoshop.

Say you have a 120 transparency and you need an 8X10 print at 300 DPI for a book right now, the file size would be 22MB. Also, in a few months you have a gallery show coming up where you’ll need a 30X40 print. The file size for that would be 300MB. We would suggest a 300MB scan to cover both.

The above example assumes we’re working with an 8 Bit file. If you want to extract the best tonal range from your original film, we recommend you get a 16 Bit file. This will double the file size for the scans to 44MB for the 8X10 print and 600MB for the 30X40 print.

If you absolutely know that you’ll never need more than an 8X10 print from the scan, then get our smallest scan (50MB). However, we’ve talked with many clients in the past that brought in files from scans that were simply too small to make the print size they’ve requested. To avoid disappointment, we encourage all our clients to get the largest scan possible.

There’s a certain amount of up-rezing or interpolating we can do in the printing process to compensate for insufficient resolution in a scan, but it’s not an optimal solution, and the results are dependent on how small the file size is that we have to work with. Up-rezing makes up pixels and puts them into your image. If you want to ensure the highest quality print, we suggest you choose the highest resolution scan as opposed to us working to make up for that deficiency.

One note here regarding 35MM scans. Some studios feel that a 100MB (at 8 Bit) is as big as you need to make any size large print. We disagree. We feel the upper limit is 150MB and have seen subtle changes in the way grain structure is rendered at that file size. We would also recommend you scan in 16 Bit which will make for finer tonal rendition and double your scan size to 300MB.

One of the great benefits of drum scans is the wet mounting process that’s used to “float” your transparency or negative in a thin liquid layer of Kami fluid between the drum and an optically clear sheet of Mylar that covers your film. This has three advantages:

1. The Kami fluid smoothes out, and makes optically transparent, the small scratches and pits that all film has.
2. The fluid minimizes the grain for a much smoother look than other non wet mounting scanners.
3. Kami fluid dries completely, leaving no reside at all on your film. Both our Raw and Corrected scans are mounted with Kami fluid.

Another great benefit of drum scanners is the ability to render all of the shadow detail that’s in your original film. This one benefit can make or break a scan in our opinion. If you exposed and processed your camera film to show the shadow detail in the scene you photographed, why would you not want all of it in your scan? Choosing any other scanner than a drum, you’re going to lose detail in the shadows that are precious.

We recently did a scan Shoot Out between our Heidelberg S3900 drum scanner and an Imacon FlexTight and an Epson V750 to see which one made the best scans. Check out the Zoomable images on that page and you be the judge of who won!

We offer two scan options to match your budget. For those who want to save some money and are comfortable with doing the clean up dust removal and level setting of their scan files in Photoshop, we offer our Raw scans at a 30% savings over our Corrected scans. On the other hand, our Corrected scans are delivered totally spotted, cleaned up and with proper levels set for a good histogram. Either way, you’re getting the best scans possible.