hi all, i wonder if you can clear this up for me,as i do my own printing im about to have a 35mm film proccesed and just want image to cd 17mb so i can load straight into ps, would the quality of the cd be as good as a neg scanner into ps, i dont normally have this problem as i use a digital camera but im trying out film again. thanks del

All things being equal (same scanner used to scan directly into Photoshop or saved as file that is burned onto a CD), the quality should be the same. I say should because there may be a difference depending on what they save the file as. Ask them what format they use. If it's a lossy format like JPEG then you will lose image data when they save it. If it's a lossless format like TIFF (LZW or ZIP) or PSD then it will be exactly the same as if you'd scanned it directly into PS. If it's a decent scanner (2700dpi or greater) then they are probably compressing with JPEG. My film scanner is 2720dpi and creates ~50MB TIFF image from a 35mm frame. At 17Mb, it sounds like they are using either JPEG or TIFF in Zip mode (and since most apps don't support the Tiff Zip mode right now, I'm gonna guess JPEG). -=>Donald

I just did a little math for a test, actually I let PS do the math for me, but as long as the file type is TIFF or another Lossless format, a 17mb image should produce a printable 8X10. If they are outputting to a JPG, I would have to pass. Reprocessing a JPG is almost never a good plan. The actual numbers for a full frame scan, TIFF with no compression, of a 35mm negative at 16.8mb yields a 2984px by 1964px image, that yields an image of 11.5in by 7.6in image at 260ppi. I repeated the test with a deferent image to see if the math lined up, and though not exact it was close. Of course the quality is going to depend on the scanner and the person and or program doing the scanning. But it may be worth a shot if you dont own a film scanner. If you do have a scanner, doing the scanning yourself, would be a much better approach.

thanks for help del