: Hmmm, haven't worked with Vuescan, but ICE works via an infrared scan : channel, so you can't duplicate the results outside the scanner. ICE, FARE, whatever they want to call it.. IR masks can be made too in camera but that's just too much work. Polaroid dust and scratch removal tool was always a good free tool that did as good a job as IR masking on most colour/chromogenic images, and as an added benefit did a good job with silver based images too >And after that, spend half an hour or so doing dust spotting on the >scan. And *old* slides or color negatives are generally not in >pristine shape. I saw many a student smearing away at a neg before slotting it into the enlarger even though I showed them specifically how holding the neg at the right angle in a bright light and using a spotting brush to remove the dust flecks could save them time - so verry few did it. dust removal is pretty easy, yet even those scanning rarely did anything to get the rubbish off - figuring the software would do it for them :/ scratches of course are not removed by FARE or ICE, but old darkroom techniques of smearing nose grease go a long way to filling the scratches on the backs of film - though a lot of scanners focus so shallow this is mute. You need a lot more scanned pixels than digital-original pixels to get the same printable image size; presumably because the original pixels are much cleaner. you've not tried photographing slides I'm guessing. digital cameras 'clean' up the original images nicely (read as do digital camera magik triks to 'clean up' the image) - and they show less grain than scanners do. My guess is they don't have the resolution (resolving power) to see the grain well - but whatever, a 'cleaner' image is made at a 'resolution' (megapixels) that dslr shooters are happy with when they're photographing real life scenes. > Hmmm, haven't worked with Vuescan vuescan will utilize whatever IR masking facilities the scanner has. it can also output in RAW format for those who like that, and it bypasses the natural clipping that occurs in most scanner software and gives access to a greater dynamic range than the scanner owner thought their scanner had. It also allows multipassing on scanners not normally equipt - and more than 2 :) but at the end of the day, if someone wants to spend 6 minutes per scan V 1/60th of a second that's fine. Like I said though, I'd not bother that much any more these days what with the upsizing algorithms and Neatimage to tidy the miniature formats, but for 4x5 and 8x10 I would still scan k
