Digital Prints

Several manufacturers such as
Microtek, Canon, HP, Agfa,
Umax, and Epson make a
wide range of flatbed models
with resolutions from
600 × 1200 dpi to 4800 ×
9600 dpi. Photographer Tom
O Scott uses the transparency
adapter on his Epson
Perfection 3200 Photo to
process photos from his
Mamiya 7ii medium-format
film camera. “My scans with
the 3200 are fantastic,” he
says. “I got some cans of compressed air to keep the glass clean, and the results are far better
than the photo lab was giving me for their usual ‘production scan.’ It takes a while
when you scan at high resolution, but if it’s a good photo, the wait is worth it.”
Automatic Dust-Busting with Digital ICE
Chapter 3 ■ Creating and Processing the Image 89
Figure 3.9 The Microtek ArtixScan
1800f flatbed features a “dual-platen”
design to accommodate a variety of
reflective, positive, and negative film
originals—from 35mm up to 8×10
inches.
Courtesy of Microtek Lab, Inc.
If you’ve ever spent hours retouching or cloning out dust, scratches, and other imperfections from scanned images, you know what a tedious chore
that can be. And this is where options like SilverFast and Kodak’s (formerly Applied Science Fiction’s) Digital ICE can be tremendous time-savers.
Digital ICE (“ICE” informally stands for Image Correction and Enhancement) is a combination of hardware and software, and a film-scanner
manufacturer must implement it at the time of manufacture. It’s a special technology that uses infrared to locate flaws on color films (it doesn’t
work on silver-halide black-and-white films, and Kodachrome is problematic due to its unique dye structure), isolate them on a fourth “defect” or
“D” channel, and then automatically delete them, leaving the image clean. Another way of doing this—besides manual “dust busting” or
cloning—has been by slightly softening or blurring the image, which isn’t always the best way to deal with this problem, as you can imagine.
Instead, Digital ICE works from within the scanner during the scanning process.
“It’s astonishing what ICE can do,” says Mark Segal, who provides an example in the nearby pair of images. “Scanning time is slower, but the
before-and-after difference is night and day.”
Other related image-enhancement and correction tools from Kodak such as DIGITAL GEM and DIGITAL ROC are also integrated into some
film scanners as the DIGITAL ICE3 Suite, but GEM and ROC along with DIGITAL SHO are also available as Photoshop plug-ins and are
covered in “Plug-ins and Filters.”
Digital ICE at work: (left) a 1958 slide
taken by Mark Segal in Zermatt,
Switzerland, shows its age. Right: the
same slide rescanned on the Konica
Minolta DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400 but
this time with ICE turned on.
Courtesy of Mark Segal