On 2012-09-25 08:27, Jan Faul wrote:
I scan my negs on a Creo and thus also employ a couple of wizards to spot the scans. One spotter hired recently claims to have a new technique for spotting and there is only one draback: she spots at 200% and thus her scans sometimes take her a week. Too bad, as I pay by the scan not the hour and her apparent confusion about how to spot is perplexing. She also like to have a number of scans open at one time because she gets bored spotting the same image and she can switch off, and she also applies grids to the scans as an apparent attempt to always know where she is. Unfortunately, none of these shenanigans are working and unless some radical shift happens, she is getting bounced.
Earlier this fall I scanned about 600 old index prints (60s) for a memorial presentation at the World Science Fiction Convention. Wish I'd had access to the negatives, but I didn't, so we worked with what we had -- and the index prints DID have good IDs written on the back for lots of people. Anyway, not having seen the negatives or his final prints, I don't know how *they* looked, but the negatives had been filthy when these index prints were made. So I was spotting at 200% (but NOT killing every dot I saw at that magnification!) using the Wacom tablet and pen, with pressure-sensitivity controlling size on the spot healing brush.
Even most of my grade-school negatives (same era; he was older than me) are cleaner than that, though the worst cases are BADLY scratched.
(I started in the upper left corner, and used scrolling by screen both directions to impose a rough grid and make sure I got everything.)
MOst of my RIT trained spotters can do a scan in 45 minutes, so using a self-taguht spotter who takes a week is foolish.
My failure mode is definitely going too far -- particularly since I use layers and "lossless editing" principles, so that if I unexpectedly make a huge print, I can go back and do any additional spotting needed without disturbing the other work. So I *try* to keep the spotting down to immediate needs. (The right choice for a personal collection where I'm doing the work myself, I think; quite probably the wrong choice when you're hiring somebody to spot scans being made for high-end prints.)
-- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
