Rob. Works + Thoughts

Lauren recently posted several polaroids that we took while in Greece. They were some of the first scans to go through our new scanner and I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I’m been tinkering today trying to figure out the best settings and I think I’ve settled on something I’m happy with. The first problem I faced was what resolution to scan at. The scanner is capable of 9600 DPI, but when a polaroid is scanned at that resolution in 48bit color mode, the files are larger than 10gb each! (Thats right 10GB!). Obviously I don’t need (nor could my computer ever handle) a 10gb file for a polaroid, and to be honest that resolution is really reserved for negatives/positives. Right now I’m scanning each polaroid to a file size of 250mb (1600dpi) and then resizing for web. I think thats larger than whan is necessary, but I’m just getting started and I love zooming in and seeing all the detail present in these Artistic TZ polaroids. Another problem I faced today was what philosophy to have when it comes to color correction. Polaroid is decidely (and beautfully) lo-fi and I feel I would be doing it a diservice to make contrast and brightness adjustments at the scanner level. Therefore for polaroids I’ve decided to do the least amount of adjustments possible. As long as the color closely resembles what I see on the polaroid then I’m happy. 35mm and large format film will be a more diffiult beast to tame. Since I’m relatively new to film, I still end up making dumb mistakes and as such I don’t mind tweaking things a bit more at the scanner level.

So this is a rescan of an Artistic TZ polaroid that was already posted at robandlauren.ca - you can follow that link to take you to the exact post.

You’ll notice that the color is not as vibrant- but that’s what polaroid is like! You’ll also notice that I’m scanning it against a piece of white mat board so that I get a bit of a drop shadow around the polaroid. Please leave any suggestions you might have on scanning polaroids in the comments.