hannah

My collarbone has healed well following the crash I had earlier this year. I mentioned that I was using my injury time to scan my parents' slides. I have now scanned a couple of thousand of these images and I would like to jot down the steps for successfully scanning slides using this scanner. I hope somebody will save some time and impress a potential mate by reading these tips.
I use the Nikon Scan 4.0 software that was included. It may be possible to scan straight into Photoshop but I like the Nikon software for its nice big levels/curves tool which is what I use most.
Here are the settings.

• Digital ICE turned on. This is scratch removal and works really well (not on black and white film). I don't think it affects image quality adversely at all.
  
• Digital ROC (Restoration of colour) turned off. I scanned hundreds of slides before I realised that this setting is mostly no good. It works well for certain kinds of shots sometimes such as portraits. Mostly, this tool messes with colours in a bad way. Perhaps it is trying to boost skin tone in inanimate objects. Leave the stupid thing off.
  
• Digital GEM off. This can reduce graininess so you might want to use it.
  
• Digital DEE turned off. I think this boosts detail in shadow. I think it makes photos look less natural. I would maybe use it on a terrible shot where I had some important detail obscured by darkness and not otherwise.
• Autofocus on. I assume this is best.
• Auto exposure off. I think this setting overexposes cloudy skies among other things. Fix the brightness once the scan is done instead.
• Maximum resolution. Always. I paid heaps for these pixels.
• Bit depth: 8 bit instead of 14 bit. JPEGs can only be 8 bit per channel (24 bit). I do my scans at 8, fix the colours in Nikon Scan and then save to JPEG straight away. If I scan using 14 bit, I have to save as TIF (or NEF). This is not too bad as Photoshop can read these images (identifying them as 16bit). After editing, Photoshop can convert to 8bit (Image>Mode>8 bits/Channel). This is the best way to preserve gradients and prevent banding but it makes no discernable difference for my purposes so I don't bother. The 14bit/channel TIFs are massive so you can brag about your 120MB Images.
• Choose Kodachrome if applicable. Otherwise your shots will be blue (and you will too).
• Analog gain off unless you have something grossly underexposed.
  

After scanning slide with the above settings. Use the Curves tool on the Tool Pallete fix the colours and contrast. This is easily done by choosing each colour channel in turn and setting the white point at or just to the right of the Histogram mountain and the black point to the left.
This might be all you need to do.
More work is needed for old film. If there is a tinge to the colours, fix it by pulling the 3 colour curves up or down and if you want to change the brighness, grab the curve for all channels (RGB). Add saturation (a little bit can look natural) by pulling up the chroma curve. I like to use one anchor point only on the curves as this tends to preserve relative levels of brightness.
Please leave comments if you have questions or corrections.

This is a picture by my dad from the early 70s scanned using this procedure.

From Old Slides and Negs