1. Store your negatives flat.
A curved negative can result in an out-of-focus scan and a perpetual need to manually refocus your scanner.
2. Clean negatives as well as you would in a darkroom.
It’s much easier to blow air on them before you scan than to clone dust out later. If you’ve got a really dirty or old negative and your scanner driver has Digital ICE (Image Correction & Enhancement), you can run it for cleaning purposes. But beware: it drastically increases your scan time.
3. Quit all other programs.
Ths will free up as much memory as possible for your scanner.
4. Consider what you want from your scan.
Don’t automatically scan at the highest resolution. If you’re only going to view the image on-screen, don’t scan at full resolution; save time and hard-drive space by scanning at 72 dpi.
Save 300 dpi for prints.
5. Check your driver for film presets.
If you can, select your type of film, and get an edge on color accuracy.
6. Make corrections first.
If you can color manage your preview, correct color and brightness/contrast before you scan. And if you’re scanning a batch of images shot under the same conditions, save your correction settings and apply them to all your subsequent scans.
7. Multisample.
Ugly noise occurs randomly, and multisampling beats it by scanning many times and making a composite of the least noisy sections from each sample.
8. Scan it twice.
If you’re having trouble getting the highlights and shadows in one scan, scan for each separately. Then make a composite using layers in an image-editing program.
9. Turn off your scanner when you’re finished!
This will prolong its life and quality.
I'll have more of these. I'm planning to scan 1500 or so negatives. So I'll be posting a few notes like this.
