frame management

[braver]

Preparing to archive thousands of slides, I wonder what is the best way to set the cropping frame for batch scans? I label two strategies Max and Min below and ponder what are the ways to better handle them.

(Max) On the one hand, if you want to preserve everything, you have to set the cropping marquee wider than any possible slide, but not wider than that, minimizing black borders, while making sure there *are* some tiny ones.

(Min) On the other hand, most of the time, it is bothersome to manually crop each and every scan. For slide show purposes, it is best to scan frameless tiffs, and batch-process them into slide show jpegs.

How does one set the frame for a batch slide scan, e.g. with SF-200 adapter for Nikon LS4000ED, when you don't have a preview for all slides? I'd appreciate a reliable technique which would allow me to get (Min)-mode scans, i.e. frameless ones, but losing minimum of picture while *definitely* scanning no frame borders.

However, if the frame border did get into the scan, I'd rather crop it in HDR/Photoshop instead of keeping track of magazines/renumbering for batch scans. What kind of a workflow do people here use for efficient cropping en masse, for slide show out of thousands of tiff scans?

I start to think that it may be necessary to do two scans, one with a large marquee and one with a definitely smaller one so that no cropping will be necessary at all...

I saw Gregory C's excellent hints and wander, how do you manage the borders for your archival scans as compared to your screen copies? I.e., what do you do in HDR to get to clean slide show from scans? You said you make sure, in VLT, that frame borders are not there, or you redo the scans -- but that applies to Nikon frame offset problem, doesn't it? What do you do in case where the scan area is positioned properly, but borders themselves get into the marquee?

Cheers,
Alexy

[LSI_Noack]

Dear Alexy

can you please provide a sample screenshot for a visual representation of the problem your facing?

Thanks very much in anticipation of your kind reply,
Sonny Noack
- tech support, LSI AG -

[braver]

OK, I've posted it in HDR, I don't have a picture handy, but the idea is very simple: I scan slides and prefer to err on setting the frame _wider_, so I get black border in the scan. Now I want to crop it in HDR, in a uniform way, obtaining final rectangles without any black and at 4:3 ratio. How best can I do it? I want to

(1) set a frame in millimeters exactly, so that 4:3 ratio holds
(2) position it in the center of the scan (how)
(3) make sure it doesn't get any black in the first scan, adjust so (1) holds
(4) see whether (3) holds for each scan -- how?, adjust otherwise
(5) repeat until (3) holds for all scans, run crops

Is this doable in Job manager?

Cheers,
Alexy