Managing tiff files

Question

I have scanned lots of slides and the size of the files are about 120 Mb each (yes, I am still in the film era). My hard drive is almost full so I need to either remove files to something like DVD (creating catalogs for each DVD?) or decrease the size of the images (maybe both). I heard that it is possible to compress tiff files using lzw compressors. My question is if Lightroom can handle compressed tiff files and which software can be used to compress tiff files to lzw in a batch process (I do not want to compress for instance 2000 images one by one). Thanks in advance! Agustin

Answer 1

Yeah, I love shooting film. There is nothing like the pop of a velvia slide. It is hard to reach the same sort of saturated colors on a computer display. That said, I get much cleaner (grainwise) pictures from digital in much shorter time, so I only do film for landscape and then only when I feel like lugging around multiple cameras. Resolutionwise, a D300 is going to be better than film for anything over ISO 50 in my experience. But those colors!
About your workflow, if you're printing at 40x50 cm, which is 15"x20", at a lab, you need at most something like 4000x6000 pixels, which gives you 300 dpi, the limit of what the Frontiers and Noritsus at labs can do. Now, you do not actually need that much for an extremely good print at that size as at 300 dpi these machines are soft. A good 200 dpi is fine too, which corresponds to an original at less than 3000 dpi. What I would do is to scan at the highest resolution (4800 dpi), archive the originals on CDs or DVDs and downscale in Photoshop to something more manageable and sharpen a little. Then I use those files in Lightroom. Whether to go down to 8-bits is pretty much up to the quality of the slide and whether you would want to make some shadows come up. Often there is very little there anyway in slidefilm (making good exposure so important), so I don't bother keeping it in 16-bits. BTW, I use these online labs quite a bit. They're much cheaper than printing yourself, give outstanding quality (higher Dmax than the best inkjet prints) and excellent color if you know what you are doing. It is hardly ever worth printing yourself, except if you want specialty papers. I do use the lab's profiles instead of sRGB to get good color though. My workflow for that is to export to 16-bit tiff or psd in prophotoRGB, open in Photoshop, scale up if necessary (often when the origin is a digital camera), sharpen for output, convert to the lab's profile and downres to 8-bits. Then I save as a jpeg and upload to the lab. I have made a few Photoshop actions that do all this automated. Why I use ppRGB in this step
is explained here. This gives me far better color fidelity than sending sRGB files.
P.S. Those pros are right indeed that you want to scan as high resolution as possible as rescanning always takes more time than simply digging up an original scan. Be aware though that the last 1000 dpi on a slide scan are rarely useful. Remember that 4800 dpi corresponds to about 100 line pairs/mm. There is hardly any film that resolves that much. Velvia's MTF50 for example is 50 lp/mm and at 100 lp/mm it only gives 10% contrast - nonexistent for all purposes even if your lens would resolve that well.