[filmscanners] Scanning Kodachrome with Digital ICE

["Jack Phipps" <JPhipps@asf.com>]

Glad you asked Bob.
Sorry it has taken me so long to get back with you. Things have been a
little hectic around here. I recently got back from a "tour of duty" in the
Boston area where we are testing out some of our dry film kiosks. I hope to
get back to Boston soon, I really enjoyed my time there. It is fun to have
"real customers" walk up to one of our kiosks, drop in their exposed
unprocessed film and walk away with prints and a CD in minutes. What
surprised me was how much fun they had. Anyway, on to your question--

You can get excellent Kodachome scans with Digital ICE. The problem with
Kodachrome is that very dark cyan layers cause a loss of detail. Of course,
any dark part of an image will have a lot of cyan in it. An example I've
mentioned several times on this list is a picture I took of a man wearing a
dark blue hat with yellow lettering. The image was very damaged, primarily
from scratches and other surface defects. Digital ICE did an excellent job
of removing all the defects from the image but it caused loss of detail on
the cap and it was hard to read the lettering. Every other part of the image
had great detail.

What I did was to scan the image twice, once with Digital ICE on and once
with it off. I loaded the images into separate layers of one file. I used
the opacity slider with the image highly magnified (200%) to ensure that the
two layers were correctly aligned. This one was just fine, but I have
experienced instances where the two images are off by a pixel or two. I just
move one layer in relationship to the other until they are aligned.

>From here you have several choices. On this one I just used the erase tool
around the lettering to bring back the lost detail. Alternatively, you could
use a layer mask. Fortunately the defects in the lettering were hardly
noticeable, my job was done. In this case I flattened the image to reduce
the file size.

Good luck with your scanning. Let me know if I can answer any other
questions!

Jack Phipps
Applied Science Fiction

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Frost [mailto:bob@frost.name]

Jack,

I use ICE with my LS4000, and often scan old Kodachromes. Some scan OK, but
others have artefacts along some edges. What is the effective work-around
you mention?

bob Frost.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jack Phipps" <JPhipps@asf.com>

 Digital ICE DOES work
with chromogenic black and white. It also works quite well with Kodachrome
in most cases. In the few cases where there is a problem, there is a very
effective work around.

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