What a title, eh?
So, the YIPPEE!!! I bought a new computer! Right now I have a cpu that is only 950MHZ- az of 5pm today I will have a cpu that is 2.53 gigaherz!(OK- so my spelling is bad there...)- Is it possible that Photoshop will now not take 10 minutes to load??? Could it be so?

Now, the BOOoooooooooooooo... I had ordered from Epson the Perfection 3170 Photo and Negative scanner- a beautiful machine. But it is not working and I have only had it a month! And they do not do exchanges on scanners, so I have to take it in to Seattle today to have it serviced and it could be a week before it is ready. I was in the middle of scanning for a client, drat.

How is everyone?

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Sindea
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Sindea, sorry to hear about your Epson 3170 experience. I have one that I bought about 6 months ago and its still working fine. It is sooo much better than my old scanner. And I've had good luck scanning negatives as long as I apply an unsharp mask afterwards. (Although I wish I could have afforded the 4870... Digital Ice.. Oooh, Aaah)

Hope you get yours back soon!

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Scott

"Help, my creativity is being held captive!"
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Thanks Scott. It is still in the shop, waiting for the part. It was the 'bottom housing'. I miss my baby....

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Sindea
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I recently bought the Epson 3170 and I am trying to embark on the huge task of scanning old negatives. Can you help me with advice on what resolution I should scan at? what res if I want to print? what res if I want to enlarge? etc?? I would appreciate any and all advice.......
Linda

If you are scanning 35mm, I recommend scanning at the maximum resolution of the scanner, 3200 dpi. This will give you the most detail when working with this size of negative. With larger format cameras you can work with less dpi, but pretty much the rule is "more is always better".

You will also want to apply some form of sharpening to the scanned image since they come out rather soft...

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Scott

"Help, my creativity is being held captive!"
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Ok. Is there an advantage to using unsharp mask in say PSE over using the sharpening feature that came with my scanner software?

Also, is there anything special that I have to do when I import the photo into PSE in order to crop and enlarge and maintain the highest resolution???

I'm sorry I'm so confused........

My personal experience is this- I scan all negs at 600DPI, even though only 300DPI is recommended for printing. I have done this with all sizes and it has been more than enough, but you will need to play around and see what works for what you want to do.

PSE does have the nifty feature to sharpen for you, but I have not found it to make a huge difference, so maybe doing it yourself may be better....

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Sindea
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Photoshop cares about memory a lot more than CPU speed so your experience with it will depend on how much memory you PC comes with. Most PC's are still being sold with 512MB.. for Photoshop use.. I recommend nothing less than 1GB. You can purchase add'l memory for about $60 per 512MB.. easily installed as well.

The load time of photoshop will also depend on how many plugins, fonts and action scripts you have. The more of these loaded.. the longer it takes. I recommend only activating those fonts that you need to use during a given session.. use software such as font reserve that allows you to activate/deactivate fonts.. your software will load MUCH faster if you don't have 2000 fonts loaded all the time! Good luck!