Desktop picture

GG1 #4896; my desktop picture. (Photo by the so-called “old guy” with the Pentax Spotmatic camera about 1968.)

I have surmised the reason the desktop picture (above) on my ‘pyooter is as great as it is, is probably because it’s a scan of the original negative.
Anyone who reads this blog knows I think the Pennsylvania Railroad’s GG1 electric locomotive is the greatest railroad locomotive of all time.
That’s because I saw so many as a teenager, and every time I did they were doing 80-100 mph.
I saw #4896 many times; even got shown through it at midnight at Washington Union Terminal in 1966. But I only got this one picture of it.
It’s on KodaColor print film, and I have a print.
I have scanned that print hundreds of times, and every time it comes up mud.
I even scanned it at 4,800 pixels-per-inch (“ppi”) once, so gigantic I was afraid of my ‘pyooter diving.
But it swallowed it. It’s just that processing such a humungous file took way too long. Just producing an image took almost an hour.
Usually I scan at 300 pixels-per-inch — maybe 15-20 seconds per image.
Images get downsized to 72 ppi (screen-resolution) for this blog.
Even at 4,800, still mud.
Muddy edge delineation. Not too bad, but not my desktop picture.
Years ago I took a Photoshop class at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, and they had a negative-scanner in their assortment of ‘pyooter equipment. All their ‘pyooters were Apple Macintosh, the ‘pyooter-of-choice for an image fiddler.
My own ‘pyooter is a MAC, which I’m told by my PC-using siblings is of-the-Devil.
It gets the same pompous reaction as my not shopping Wal*Mart — and riding a Honda motorcycle instead of Harley-Davidson. (Jesus rode a Harley.)
I have a Nikon “Cool-Scan” negative scanner myself, just like Visual Studies Workshop, but it’s never been installed.
It’s SCSI (Small-Computer-System-Interface; “Skuzzy”), the terminal of my original print-scanner, which went back to my earlier MAC.
That MAC had only one SCSI port, so installing the negative-scanner meant daisy-chaining one step beyond my original print-scanner.
Never done.
My SCSI scanner made it to my current MAC, which meant installing a SCSI card. By then personal-computer technology had moved on to USB ports.
My original print scanner was fairly large, but not large enough to scan some of my larger calendar prints.
So I got a bigger one, an Epson 10000XL. The platen on that thing is a little over 12 x 17 inches — the biggest you could get (at that time), and still be a scanner.
My largest calendar-prints are around 17+ inches, so I just center. I used to have to scan twice on my original scanner and “merge” with Photoshop. —Which can be done, but it’s sloppy. I prefer one scan.
The 10000XL is USB port, so my SCSI port went unused.
I could probably set up my negative-scanner, but in 2003 I went to a digital camera.
So I still have little reason to set up my negative-scanner, since nearly all my image-files are from the digital camera.
My negatives are stored — there’s only a couple images worth doing.
And most film-images are fine with scanning a print on the 10000XL. There’s only a few that could use a negative-scan.
#4896 is one. Edge-sharpness transfers better from the negative — prints are okay, but aren’t as sharp as the negative.

• RE: “‘Old guy’ with the SpotMatic.......” —My macho, blowhard brother-from-Boston, who is 13 years younger than me, calls me “the old guy” as a put-down (I also am the oldest). The “Spotmatic” is my old Pentax Spotmatic single-lens-reflex 35mm film camera I used about 40 years, since replaced by a Nikon D100 digital camera.
• I am a railfan, and have been since I was a child.
• “‘Pyooter” is computer. “PC” is personal-computer, the standard personal-computer, built to the Microsoft architecture, usually with the “Windows®” operating-system. (An Apple Macintosh has its own operating-system.) —Most people have PCs. (Macintosh versus PC is war — similar to Ford versus Chevrolet.)
• “72 ppi (screen-resolution)” is 72 pixels-per-inch, the usual resolution of a ‘pyooter-monitor. (Pixel being an image-bit.) An image at larger resolution gets displayed as only a portion, so the monitor can still display at 72 ppi. 300 ppi is fairly tight; 4,800 is extreme.
• “Photoshop” is the standard image-processing computer software application. (I originally had version 5.5 [still have it]; but now have “Photoshop Elements,” which isn’t the full Photoshop, but enough for what I do.)
• All my siblings are tub-thumping born-again Christians.