Tong Family

OK back two years ago, I wrote about my workflow and it hasn’t changed much since then mainly because I stopped archiving photos. The main reason was that Vuescan kept hanging with macOS Sierra and that was really annoying.
For whatever reason the latest Vuescan and High Sierra seem to get along, so I’m back in business scanning files. The main workflow is:

1. Vuescan to get the images, I scan in 5400 dpi with 3 samples so it isn’t fast, I’m also using auto flip and auto sku and this gets converted into gigantic TIFF files. I use the infrared scan to get rid of scratches.
2. The next step is to convert those TIFFs into 16-bit lossless JPEG 2000 files, which gets things down to a reasonable (in today’s world size) of something like 80MB per image. Photoshop supports JPEG-2000 writing, but it does cost money (more it seems each year), so I’m off to see if GIMP works. I tried Imagick last time and it didn’t work, but maybe GIMP will. Unfortunately, there isn’t much focus on the Mac, only 2.8 is available and neither 2.9 nor 2.10 are on the Mac.