Snow

Can’t remember the last time we had snow before Christmas, but this year we’re making up for earlier mild years. The snow hit us on Tuesday and at varying rates its been falling since then with no sign of a thaw. Today (Thursday) we have about a foot of snow between the house and the hutch.
Post has been delayed, although we’ve had a couple of deliveries today and yesterday its been nothing like normal volumes. Parcel post and courier deliveries have disappeared which is probably just as well as between here and the nearest main road we’ve got a lot of snow. Judging by past experience we won’t be gritted here until tomorrow at the earliest.
We have been able to get through a lot of work, but not as much as in normal days. Might sound wimp but its just been so cold even though the heating has been going full blast. We are hopeful that we’ll be back to full production from tomorrow.

Aperture Updates

If you have a Mac and use Aperture, either in connection with your own digital photos or with photo scanning, download the latest update to Aperture. I’ve noticed a few problems of late, particularly corrupting images as they’re loaded. The update seems to have fixed this.

iPhoto Trash

Busy week, photo scanning like crazy. Even did some for clients, not just friends and neighbours. Then there’s the “Could you just ....” which in this case was “knock up” a couple of slideshows. So I spent a few evenings using iPhoto and Aperture to create something impressive. That’s by the by, the point is I suddenly got a message on my MacBook suggesting I was running out of disc space.
Quick run around the usual places to free up space yielded little, then I remembered that neither iPhoto nor Aperture actually delete files from your hard drive when you move them to Trash within the application. If you look under the File menu in each there’s a command which does delete unwanted images. I guess it’s a double failsafe function but one that’s all too easy to overlook. Me included.
What struck me was all the scanned photos that were lurking in purgatory - nearly 3000 in iPhoto and a massive 7000 in Aperture. Now all gone, permanently.

Re-thinking jpg compression

Mention the term jpg and in some quarters you can hear the disapproval down the phone line. Why? As all too many people know jpg compression ruins photos.
Really?
I will accept that if you want the maximum, in terms of available data, then a TIFF file is better. However we charge more to scan to a TIFF, reflecting the time taken, impact on data storage costs, number of DVDs we burn and the time that takes too. But ask yourself, is it really necessary? Will you really edit your photos that much?
The received wisdom against jpg goes back a long way, IT is a fast moving field. A slide scanned today into a jpg file can’t be compared to one made 5, 10 or 15 years ago. Today’s jpgs are much better than their critics believe, if you doubt it give it a try. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

What can be done?

When it comes to negative scanning the vast bulk of our work is scanning 35mm material, but we do get many other formats - including some that are smaller. It’s a basic rule that the smaller the original the poorer the enlargement (all other things being equal). What can be done to make the best of small source files which appear excessively grainy?
We use a great piece of software that can be used as an add-on to Photoshop and Aperture. This reduces grain and at the same time improves sharpness. It can work wonders on grainy scans, or scans with excessive noise, and it gives good results just using the default settings. It’s called Neat Image, and I believe you can download a trial version at no cost.

iPhoto Ate My Hard Drive

We scanned a very large number of photos and slides for a client, she was kind enough to say she was happy with the results which she was going to load into iPhoto on her sleek new MacBook Air.
Having done that she wasn’t so happy. She complained that having loaded all the digital images she had no hard drive capacity left. Why?
I did some digging and found out how iPhoto treats the photo loading process. When you Import photos iPhoto actually copies each image from the source file into its own library, our client had taken a two step process. First, she’d copied all our files from the DVDs we supplied onto her hard drive. Second, she then imported into iPhoto. All went well and naturally she assumed the “source” files were those she was seeing in iPhoto. But the whole process had eaten twice as much disk space as necessary.
Solution - simply delete the copes of the photo scans we’d done. Disk usage back to a sensible level.

35mm Slide Scanner Amnesty

Today we launch a scheme to enable people to turn their cheap, nasty little slide scanners into valuable credit to use against professional scanning. We’re doing this to show people that the rotten results often delivered by these devices (blotchy shadows, bleached out highlights, artefacts, poor quality) is not representative of what a top flight scanner such as our Nikon’s can deliver.
The Amnesty allows a full credit (purchase price incl. VAT, postage) for USB 35mm scanners against scanning services for 35mm slide, 35mm negatives or prints. Details on this page - 35mm Slide Scanner Amnesty.