Find a Workflow While Digitizing Old Film Shots

I recently bought an Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner to scan my old negatives, slides, and prints and get them into the digital age. It is going to be a long, tedious project and it was even more tedious before I found an efficient workflow.

My slides have been the bulk of the project so far because I knew where they all were and there were not nearly as many as I was going to have to do with either my negatives or prints when I can't find the negatives.

I'd clean off the slides with a soft cloth and blow off what dust might be left. I'd add slides to the scanner, four at a time, and then preview and scan the pictures. Maybe 10 minutes per set. I'd then preview the picture. Inevitably I'd find dust on the scans. Delete the ones with dust, reclean, rescan, and rename files. Dust. Ugh.

After a while I got tired of recleaning and retrying so I fired up Photoshop CC and tried the healing brush. It took some tries on settings until I found one that did what I was trying to do. (Size 25px, hardness of 2%, spacing 25%, 100% round, and if I was using my Wacom pen pressure would change the size.) I could now remove dust in one try, not several.

I was still moving slowly because I'd scan all and then check. It got much better once I started checking the images as each picture finished until the entire set did. Got to the point that I was setting up a batch, previewing it, and the launch the scan. Within a few minutes I was looking at the first image and by the time I was done with it, the next was ready.

Much more efficient. Still tedious but not as bad.

It's been much nicer once I start doing negatives and can be doing 8 pictures in a batch since I can do two of the standard 4 negative strips at once.

Still, it's going to be a long road.