Image Gallery for Toronto, Canada
I finally finished the promised Toronto gallery consisting of 160+ black and white images scanned from 8″x10″ darkroom prints.
Not sure what my next gallery project will be. Where I go from here will probably be based on what print boxes I decide to scan next. At some point I will be adding galleries for my travels to cities in Italy, but I’m not ready for another large project at the moment. What I’d really like to do next is get back to the fun of shooting, developing and printing. I’m not getting any younger…
Textured Surface Scan Issues No More
On a side note, I think I am finally past the issue of getting speckly scans from photo paper with a textured pearl surface. The problem started when I decided to create higher resolution images on this website which meant increasing the scan resolution from 300 dpi to 600 dpi. While the problem first appeared on my Epson V600 scanner, it became even more problematic when I started scanning with the Epson 13000XL. The ultimate fix was a combination of scanning at an even higher resolution (1200 dpi) and then using SilverFast Ai Studio 9 dust and scratch removal tool, SRDx. It just so happens that the size of the white specks from the pearl texture are very tiny, smaller than most dust specks or scratches, making it a fairly easy job to tune the dust and scratch software to thoroughly eliminate those bazillions of tiny white specks without affecting the detail in the image. The tuning can be done once and then use the same settings for all subsequent prints. I don’t have a very serious dust problem because I use an air compressor to blow dust off of prints before scanning, making manual dust removal with GIMP fairly quick.
Note that I am not pitching SilverFast scanner software in general. For me it worked better than EpsonScan2 or Vuescan for this particular issue, but I still prefer EpsonScan software for negatives or slides because if finds the frames more accurately and is quicker to use. I prefer Vuescan when using the scanner as a reflection densitometer.
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