They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Well this one is definitely the case.
Most of you know that I have two scanners. One is an Epson flatbed and the other one is a cheap instant scanner that uses a small fixed focus camera to sent the images to an SD card. While I like the Epson, I really love the cheap scanner. It's fast and does a decent enough job most of the time. But I did say most and not all the time. When I scan negatives that are under/over exposed, it plays havoc with the internal software, and that's a problem. I often get images that need a lot of work on the levels in order to produce something. And then, I end-up with an histogram that looks like a comb with missing teeth. The image is gritty and not pleasant to look at. I know I should have used the Epson and scan in 48 bit color, but this is slow and it p***** me out. So I had to come out with a new solution.
I started to think that one way would be to get the computer to artificially generate the greater color range. That would be definitely faster than a re-scan and possibly be just what's needed. But how to do this? Well it got me thinking about some guy I read about a long time ago who scans everything in 24 bit color at maximum scanner resolution for fast scans and then converts the image to 48 bit color before doing a bicubic resize to generate the missing tones. So I went that way. In the process of experimenting, I discovered that you don't need to cut as much into the image resolution as I first thought. To my surprise, a 99% resize it all it really takes, so I was getting into business.
But while Photoshop is all nice and good, it's big, slow and unwieldy for such a task. I wanted something small, fast and nimble. And since I love little programs that do only one thing but do it really well, I decided to write it using a windows batch script. But since scripts have no image manipulating possibilities, I decided to go for something small and powerful: ImageMagick.
ImageMagick is a command line image manipulation program that is a bit of a pain to use but incredibly powerful. It comes from the Linux world, is open source, free and available for Windows and Mac.
So, this is what I needed. Perfect.
I just added a bit of coding, some magic ingredients and I now had the perfect script.
It supports drag and drop of a single folder or multiple JPEG files. Does all the operations and saves the files as TIFF files. And best of all, it works wonders when it comes to extreme histogram compressions. There is a routine at the start that checks if ImageMagick is installed. If it is not, you get a warning and your browser opens to the ImageMagick.org website just like by magic. It's even got a color splash screen when it runs on Windows 10... a feat in itself.
For those who want to give it a try, here's the link to my Google Drive.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hb3evaz43Y-t_Vj0OVL50MDsZ8NovPt4It is only 3.31kb big, so you won't bust your monthly bandwidth.
Enjoy!
