As I scan all these old negatives, I am doing it so I never have to do it again (I hope): I am scanning them fullsize (4000 dpi) as TIFF files. Huge. A single 36mm x 24mm image takes up 44 Mb.
But it seemed there must be some way to take those and re-use/re-purpose them: change them to jpeg files, resize them.
Remember Automator? The app that got the big shrug at the launch of OS X Tiger? Yeah, quite, I ignored it too.
Me three. Seems there sure is.
Then I realized I wasn’t leveraging this Burn Folder idea, where any folder can be magically turned into a shiny CD/DVD. Turns out Automater can do that too. I need to have it monitor the size of a folder to see when it gets to 700Mb. But what to do when it gets there? Hmm. Need to investigate. This looks promising. Might require me to change my workflow slightly, but who cares?
As noted here, you can make any folder a Burn Folder on the fly.
When I get something that
- checks for the size of a directory (seems there could be some math involved to determine when one more file, assuming files of similar size, won’t fit)
- creates a Burn Folder
- populates it
- burns it to disk
I’ll post the results.
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Ugh, I feel your pain. I’ve got 50+ rolls of medium format to scan. A 6×6 cm frame at 4800 dpi is 320+ MB and takes about 20 minutes (with IR dust removal, it’s more like 45-50). Ugh.
To determine the file sizes from a shell script, check out the man page for du (Terminal -> “man du”).
I didn’t read far enough back. You obviously know about du, sorry!
I can’t use dust removal for some reason. The images get trashed: I get this really dark posterized image (maybe 4 bits deep?). I suppose it could be the thinness of these negatives, as they seem a little light. But the other post-processing tools — ROC and GEM — make them look alright.
Are they B&W? If so, Digital ICE won’t work.
(In-scanner dust removal is done with a fourth infrared channnel. Color films are IR-transparent, so any pixel that doesn’t receive IR is deemed dust and interpolated. Since the image in B&W film is metallic silver, it blocks IR, and it thinks the entire image is dust. ROC and GEM are software-only processing algorithms, so they should work as usual.
If it’s color film, I don’t know what to say other than, “strange”.)
Huh. Ok, then. So I’m not crazy (or not more so).
Guess I need to blow the dust and hairs off these by hand. Actually, I’m pretty pleased with how clean they appear to be, after sitting in sleeves for a dozen years.
Thanks for clearing that up.
I’m considering re-doing the almost 50 scans I did already with ROC and GEM off, just au naturel, rather than archive them in a modified form. I’d rather pick and choose images to work with unmodified than curse myself for limiting my options at some later date.
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