Don’t Let Perfect…

Don’t let perfect get in the way of good enough.

Online there are no end of things you can buy. You can buy a new camera and “better” lenses and new camera bags (I’m up to seven and counting.) and more editing software.

And it’s software that is interesting me as now I’m scanning a lot more black and white and soon colour film (which I got for free at my local camera club) using an Epson V600 and Plustek 8200i. Currently I am scanning using the native Epson scanner software (which is pretty good) and VueScan and Silverfast (which have more features which I am still learning).

Once I scan my negatives as TIFFs I am working on them using the Eposure 7 RAW editor.

I used to use LightRoom and PhotoShop both of which are terrific but do have a significant learning curve. There are a lot of lesser photo editors out there that just get the job done.

For example, with Exposure 7 I get a RAW editor that has among many other features the ability to produce layers but best of all has a how bunch of black and white and colour film presets that install with a single click. Now if I was still shooting commercial images I’d prefer to use Lightroom with a bunch of third-party presets but for my social media work Exposure 7 is good enough.

So good enough got me to thinking about my scans from my two scanners. Generally when I hit the right exposure in the negative the scans come out pretty well. But then I got to surfing on YouTube and I started watching videos on software that its manufacturers claim will result in better images.

Basically negative converting software takes your scans and does a “pre soak” of your RAW or TIFF images and does some pre-editing colour and noise corrections prior to exporting to your actual RAW editor.

The results I see for Lightroom plugins like Negative Lab Pro or the standalone product called FilmLab seem very impressive but there’s a very good chance that my own scans from my scanners are actually good enough for my purposes.

Same for noise reduction software especially for my digital images produced by my micro four-third format cameras look very interesting. Topaz DeNoise AI and DxO PureRAW 4 among others are on my list to check out.

A lot of this software comes with two week or even month-long free demo periods. Once I get some more exposed and developed film I’ll be giving this stuff a trial run.

Again though, if you’re shooting for social media, what you have now might just be good enough.