This weekend, I'm scanning film. The past summer, I shot Velvia 100 as my primary film, and it just came back from being developed. Usually, I take it to Allied Digital Photo in Germantown, but I have not had good success there lately -- many water spots and some scratches. So, I sent my Velvia to Dwayne's Photo.
I had never before used a develop-by-mail service, but I was very pleased with Dwayne's results: no water spots, and no scratches. All my frames were nicely mounted, and in the correct order. On the canisters, I wrote the dates I finished the rolls; Dwaynes saw this, and even wrote that date on the slide boxes. This was very nice of them to do, and I'm sure I'll be doing business with them in the future.
I am now running Linux as my full-time operating system, so I needed to modify my previous workflow. VueScan, which is one of my favorite programs, does not support my scanner (Plustek OpticFilm 8200i) on Linux, so I needed to turn on my Mac Mini to do the actual scanning.
I have it running in a VNC window (fullscreen on the OS X side), and it appears as a 'native' GTK+ window on my Linux side thanks to Remmina.
The scans are being done at 64-bit RGBI, with multiexposure. Since Velvia is a low-lattitude film, I wanted to make sure I scanned as much detail as possible. Just like all my other scans, I capture them at 2400 DPI (Which results in a roughly 3000x2000 image, around 50 MB).
The colors in the outdoor shots are looking amazing!
I need to figure out how to do dust removal. I have been reading online, and I think a context-aware fill (like what Photoshop and Gimp can do) is the way to go. Here is some research I found about that.