Erik DeBill
New member
Saturday everyone went to my parent's house to help them put up Christmas lights. Naturally, I took my camera, which let me practice taking long exposures and thinking about reciprocity failure.
Once I developed the film, it meant I had several shots to scan and work with on the computer. Before, I'd never had more than one negative to scan and process at a time. What's more, 2/3 of those negatives were from polaroids, which aren't quite as big as 4x5 negatives. That little bit of extra size makes a big difference. Like the difference between 2G of RAM being fairly comfortable and it being painfully slow.
The slow pace of processing these large files made what seemed like it should be a 30 minute job turn into a several hour ordeal, waiting for progress meters to complete. Saving the files afterwards was painfully slow, too. I'm either going to have to spend a lot on upgrades or learn to be more efficient when I'm processing files on the computer.
I'd seen recommendations to always scan at a resolution based on your intended output, rather than always going for the maximum. That makes a lot more sense in the context of overloading my computer. There is so much information in a 4x5 negative that unless I'm going to print it truly huge, I may be better off backing down on the scan resolution. I'd already gone from 4800 to 2400 dpi. Next time I'll start with 1200. I might even try scanning at both 600dpi and 2400dpi, then processing the 600dpi image, saving a template and then applying it to the 2400dpi scan all in one go.
Once I developed the film, it meant I had several shots to scan and work with on the computer. Before, I'd never had more than one negative to scan and process at a time. What's more, 2/3 of those negatives were from polaroids, which aren't quite as big as 4x5 negatives. That little bit of extra size makes a big difference. Like the difference between 2G of RAM being fairly comfortable and it being painfully slow.
The slow pace of processing these large files made what seemed like it should be a 30 minute job turn into a several hour ordeal, waiting for progress meters to complete. Saving the files afterwards was painfully slow, too. I'm either going to have to spend a lot on upgrades or learn to be more efficient when I'm processing files on the computer.
I'd seen recommendations to always scan at a resolution based on your intended output, rather than always going for the maximum. That makes a lot more sense in the context of overloading my computer. There is so much information in a 4x5 negative that unless I'm going to print it truly huge, I may be better off backing down on the scan resolution. I'd already gone from 4800 to 2400 dpi. Next time I'll start with 1200. I might even try scanning at both 600dpi and 2400dpi, then processing the 600dpi image, saving a template and then applying it to the 2400dpi scan all in one go.
