I’m still learning the happy medium between getting photos posted right away after an event, and doing a good job of retouching, keywording, and captioning at the same time. But I did want to get some posted on the Sojourners blog at God’s Politics, so here’s a link to that post. And here’s a slide show link. And here are some of my favorite shots from the day:

After marching through my existing digital archive last year, I embarked on the daunting task of scanning my entire negative film archive—more than 15 years of color and black and white negatives. I started with color, which was smaller—only about 10 years’ worth, and have now begun scanning black and white. Here’s my color workflow. My B&W is still under refinement, as I contemplate the best solution for removing dust and scratches. Unfortunately, the miracle of ICE, which automagically uses infrared light to somehow sense and eliminate blemishes from color film does not work with the silver emulsions of B&W film. So sad. BUT, ON WITH COLOR…!

1. Scan in NikonScan

• I scan directly in NikonScan—rather than doing a Photoshop import scan—because this allows you to save scanned images while another scan is in progress.
• Scan at maximum resolution
• Leave curves alone, unless you need to tweak to avoid clipping in the histogram
• I leave multisample scanning in Normal (1x) mode—for my purposes, higher settings just seem to add a lot of processing time without significant improvements in quality. I did a bunch of side-by-side comparisons to come to this conclusion.
• I also only can at a bit depth of 8 rather than 16 like all the purists out there. For my purposes (primarily freelance journalism, microstock), I can’t justify the additional hard drive space.
• I use the following ICE/ROC/GEM settings:
  • ICE=normal (I don’t find higher settings make significant difference)
  • ROC=0 (ROC is supposed to fix faded colors from old negs—which hasn’t been a problem for me)
  • GEM=3 (GEM reduces the appearance of film grain. This can introduce artifacting and loss of detail if overused, so I set it at 3 for a happy medium)
  • Note: using any of these settings significantly increase processing time–though I find that the results from using ICE far outweigh the time I’d spend retouching in Photoshop with the clone or heal tools.
• I didn’t discover Nikon Scan’s batch feature until I was done with the bulk of my color archive. That was frustrating. But it took some fiddling to figure out that you have to set the settings for each frame before they’d stick during batch scanning. Still not quite sure what I did to make it work right, but here’s the forum thread that I read to help me figure it out. Nikon scan also has pretty good naming options in batch mode that are real time savers, allowing prefixes, suffixes, and sequences with a selected number of digits. Now if I could only get all those evenings back I spent single scanning. At least I got through all five seasons of Lost on Netflix instant viewing…

2. Save as TIFF

• Though I swear by RAW formats when shooting digital, I’m not convinced that it’s necessary or an improvement over lossless formats like TIFF when scanning.
• TIFF also embeds metadata when retouching in Lightroom, eliminating the need for XMP sidecars required for RAW (NEF with NikonScan) formats

3. Import to Lightroom

• Make all color corrections, adjustments, levels
• Add captions, keywords, etc.

4. Export JPEGs for online archive, microstock

This tip is probably obsolete for most of my photographer friends shooting digital nowadays, but … I just discovered that a 55mm lens, aperture wide open, makes a nice loupe if you don’t have a real one handy. That is, looking directly through the lens—not with it attached to a camera.

I’m doing a lot of scanning these days, so it’s critical to be able to check sharpness, etc. before popping the negative into the scanner or you end up wasting a lot of time previewing when you can just click “scan” if you know it’s good. Look for a post on scanning workflow sometime soon. It’s definitely a work in progress.