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Professional Photographers Using Linux?
thesun asks: "I'm a freelance writer and photographer and I'm wondering what Pro Photographers have done in regards to color matching and scanning under Linux, especially when going from slides to digital. I just can't get anything close to a good image when I scan a slide. They're blurry and the colors are so off that doing anything with my thousands of slides is proving to be prohibitively time-consuming. Are other Pros (or talented amateurs) having similar problems? Are there solutions out there I haven't found? (Sorry, I can't dump thousands into a piece of hardware---I'm looking for a way to make the most of my Epson Perfection 2400 with transparency adapter)."
...is a joke. If you want any kind of decent results, you need a REAL film scanner. Check eBay.
I wound up buying a Nikon LS30 for the several negatives images in my collection.
The specs on a real film scanner as opposed to a flatbed are night and day. When a film scanner says it does X resolution, it's real. When a flatbed says it, it's probably some kind of interpolated crap marketing hype.
The ratio of black to white on the scanned image is also vastly larger with a film scanner - this makes a big difference, particularly with slides. You're going to lose a lot of data if you don't have as wide a bit lattitude as you can get.
In short, you're going to put a lot of time into scanning those slides. Don't sell short the value of your time. It's stupid to spend 500 to 1000 or more hours of your life using a piece of junk. Better off just not doing it until you have access to the proper equipment.
Ask around. There may be people who can lend you a proper scanner. I've lent mine to several friends, since it's not like I use it all the time; I'm now completely digital. My scanner sits in its box for 6 months to a year at a time. It's possible you could find someone similar who might let you borrow it for a few months.
A friend of mine was using his Powerbook (Firewire) to do professional photography for his uncles studio. He was scanning slides in with his Nikon slide scanner, and recording them to CD's.
One day, the Powerbook quit recognizing the scanner. If you've worked with Macs (OS 9) you know how they can be. They 'just work'. But when something goes wrong...
The first thing he tried was buying a SCSI card, and installing it in his new Compaq PC with Windows 2000. Downloaded the drivers, installed the scanner...seemed to work great untinl he tried to scan some slides. Only half the slide would show up. The whole thing would show up in the preview mode, however...
After screwing around with Nikon support, re-installing the drivers, and even a fresh install of Windows, I joked that he should try it under Linux.
We took the SCSI card out of the Compaq, and put it in a Pentium 166MMX he got from TigerDirect for $49.99. We loaded up Redhat, SANE recognized it, and everything worked perfectly on the very first try. Odd thing was, it ran faster than it did on the Powerbook.