Hi Hersch,
I don't know if your reply was meant to go to the list, but I decided to
reply to the list since my comments below may be of interest to others.
> Rob, I guess your dust 'cure' would help, but I think
> (I 'know'!) some of my dust problems come from static
> electricity.
Is the humidity low where you are? Putting the scanner on its side may
help prevent the films getting dustier in the scanner, but it won't make
any dust drop off the film that is already there. At least I'd be surprised
if it did!
> The one-hour 'mini lab' that develops my negatives,
> sleeves them in translucent plastic. When I remove
> the negative strips, I have a hard time getting the
> plastic off my fingers!
Sounds like the humidity must be very low. My negs come sleeved in plastic
as well, but I never get static effects like that. I am putting all the
films into archival sheets which are clear plastic. I suspect that the slight
roughness of the translucent sheets the minilabs use may tend to generate
more static though friction. They couldn't use the archival sheets because
the machine which does the sleeving wouldn't be able to feed the film into
them.
> Since you apparently use mounted slides for all your
> work, you might be avoiding that problem.
No, I live in a sub-tropical area where the humidity is seldom really low.
Many of my better photos are slides, but I still have a huge amount of colour
negs.
On the weekend I put about a dozen or so slide films into archival sheets
and in the process found that a lot had some mould growth. I've cleaned
them as best I can with PEC12 but that has left some damaged - the mould
dissolved the emulsion so the image is gone. The PEC-12 didn't damage the
film. With the humidity, mould is a real problem. I have to do something
about the rest of the films before too much else is lost. Luckily the mould
was on the non-emulsion side of some slides.
> All it really costs me is time. I have to scan at 64 bit
> RGBI in order to use Ed's Clean function. I guess we
> discussed that earlier, and I'm sure that handling those
> huge files is slowing me down a lot.
It depends on how you look at it. You are slowed down by using IR cleaning,
but hand spotting of images is MUCH slower. I'd forgotten how tedious it
was until I scanned that Provia 100F film which wouldn't clean with Vuescan.
Have you tried timing the process if you scan at 24bit RGB?
Rob
PS I got an antistatic brush which seems to work well on slides but makes
little difference on negs. I have the impression that a lot of the dust
on negs is bonded into the emulsion during processing, or was in contact
with the film during processing so that a spot is left where the film didn't
get developed properly. Colour neg film also seems to hold static charge
better than slide film, but I may be imagining it.
Rob Geraghty harper@wordweb.com
