scanning astro negatives

[Andrew*]

I sent off a film with images of M45 and Mars and some widefields too. They came back from the developers WITHOUT THE PRINTS

So while I'm on holiday I thought I would have a go at scanning the negatives, but due to the low level of light on the negatives, dust is showing up very prominently and ruining the image.

There are some good shots on there I know, so what can I do? Of course I will get to the developers and see what they're playing at!

Cheers

ANdrew

[blinky]

Cannot help you Andrew, but did you ask for them to be put on a CD when they were developed? That way you get a very high quality image you can use!

[Andrew*]

Cannot help you Andrew, but did you ask for them to be put on a CD when they were developed? That way you get a very high quality image you can use!

I didn't ask for a CD because previously when I did, the resolution and scan quality was not very good.

I can't work out why I never got my prints, but I expect them to go out of their way to make sure I get them, especially as I paid extra for the larger size.

At home I will try to blow off the dust from the negatives and use a good slide scanner to see if I can get my images back. It might have been the last time I use Klick for processing. Unfortunate, really, as they generally offer a good service

Does anyone have any experience from the dim and distant past of scanning their astro images from slides/negatives? I know, I really must "go digital"

Andrew

[Astroscot2]

Hello Andrew,

I still accasionally scan my own color negatives with a hi res flatbed scanner, an Epson 3200 photo.

I took me some time to get the hang of producing scans which I was happy with. Is very hard to remove all the dust from the negatives, compressed air and the clone brush in photoshopworked for me.

The difficutly with scanning is obtaining the full dynamic range of the image, I ended up purchasing software called viewscan which allowed close inspection of the image histogram. The other issue I faced was the size of the images scanned, ,my Mamiya 6 x4.5 camera produced files around 400 MB per image which takes some time to process.

Stick with slide film , Elitechrome 200 is a good choice, ideal for Astrophotography where the developers are only processing the slide.

I recommend Loxley Colour http://www.loxleycolour.com/ I use them and they give you a good turnaround at a fair price.

[Astroman]

The problem with most photo processing shops now is they let the machine figure the exposure time of the print. An astrophoto has very small bits of information on them, (the stars), and large areas of darkness, (the sky). Here in the States, I go to a higher end processing shop and tell them there are astrophotos on the roll and to print all frames. This usually works, but not always. I sometimes need to take another trip to tell them to print them. If you have or find a slide scanner, that should work, too. You can reverse the negs in photoshop or something.

Good luck!