Maximum PC

Yeah, you're all going to think I've gone off the deep-end with that headline, but here it is...

I've started practicing better slide scanning workflow, one which lets me game while scanning slides, without any less attention to quality.

Here's a typical workflow for scanning slides:
1: Pop the slide into scanner
2: Press the "Preview button" and wait 30 seconds for a preview.
3: Make any corrections to color, brightness, contrast, crop window, rotation, etc.
4: Press the scan button and wait 2 minutes for the scan to complete.
5: Eject the slide, pop another in, rinse and repeat.

Now, here's a workflow that leverages the power of RAW image processing.
1: Pop a slide into the scanner.
2: The slide is automatically scanned in entirety, the mount included, in a RAW image format, preserving everything for processing later.
3: Eject, pop another in, rinse, and repeat.
4: Once all slides have been scanned as RAW images, load them back up, make corrections on sets of images at a time (every image in a scene will likely have similar color, exposure, etc), and once satisfied batch process the lot.

What's really cool is that as you can scan slides in volume while doing other tasks. It takes around 1.5 minutes for my Nikon Coolscan V to complete a 2000ppi scan of a 35mm slide, around 8 megapixels, and store it in a 64bit RGBi RAW file.

This past two days I've scanned 250 slides, mostly while playing Diablo 3 beta, as well as taking an open course at Stanford on database management.

In fact, I've scanned 8 slides in the short time I've spent writing this post!

This is made possible with Ed Hamrick's Vuescan, a software I've been using for the past 8 years.

Here's Ed's instructions for RAW workflow:
http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/html/vuesc15.htm

Dan O.