After my earlier reply, I realized there may be a way to scan directly into Photoshop using the software built into your Mac. It only requires downloading and installing one Epson software component, which will allow the Epson scanner to be seen by the built-in scanning features in macOS, which Photoshop can use.
I tested this using an Epson scanner I have from the early 2000s that is older and less capable than a V700, so I think it should work with a V700, which is said to be a very nice scanner.
1. Go to the Epson web page for the V700, select your operating system, then expand the Drivers section. Download the file “ICA Scanner Driver v5.8.23 for Image Capture”. This will download a disk image named “ESICA_5.8.23.dmg”.
2. Double-click ESICA_5.8.23.dmg, and run the installer in it. This installs a component that allows macOS to see the Epson scanner directly.
3. Connect the V700 scanner to the Mac and set it up to scan film. On my Epson, this involves using the film holder and making sure the lid backlight is on.
4. Open Photoshop, and choose the menu command File > Import > Images From Device. That command connects Photoshop to macOS built-in scanning, and opens the Import Images from Device dialog box which is not part of Photoshop but is actually supplied by macOS.
5. If the name of the V700 scanner isn’t selected in the left sidebar under Devices, select it. This will display scanning options in the right sidebar.
6. If it doesn’t do an overview scan on its own, click the Overview button.
7. In the right sidebar, make sure all of the settings are the way you want them, including the folder where it will save the scan. After you set the frame Size, you can drag the dashed rectangle over the film frame you want to scan next. Remember that because consumer film frames are so small, the scanning resolution should be high if you want to be able to print enlargements from the file. I set mine to 3200 dpi, which will allow a 300 ppi enlargement of a 35mm frame at up to about 10 inches. However, the actual sharpness you get can depend on other factors, such as whether the film has a curl to it (causing edges to go out of focus) and whether the film holder can keep that film flat.
7. Click Scan to do the final scan. The macOS scanning software saves the new image to the folder set in Scan To, and also sends it to Photoshop, which opens the scan.
(There is a way to make macOS scanning save each frame separately in one pass: Select Custom Size and then draw out the other frame rectangles yourself, because at least for my scanner it doesn’t auto-detect each film frame. VueScan, shown below, can auto-detect all frames and save each separately.)
By adding the Epson scanning component to the Mac, you can use the Epson scanner with any application that takes advantage of macOS built-in scanning. Step 4 showed how to get to macOS scanning from inside Photoshop, but you can also do it by:
Opening Apple Image Capture.
Opening any application that has a command that opens that same macOS scanning dialog box. For example, in Apple Preview the command is File > Import from Scanner, in Affinity Photo the command is File > Acquire Image, and in Pixelmator Pro the command is File > Import.
One more note…the scanner did not work reliably through a USB hub. I had to attach it to a USB port on the Mac itself. The Epson help files do warn about this.
Again, I think scanning one frame at a time into Photoshop is a very slow way to scan thousands of negatives. And, macOS built-in scanning offers only basic options compared to the software by Epson or VueScan. Below is what VueScan is going to do using the same Epson scanner, after I set it up: Auto-detect all frames in the strip (because Multi Crop is on), restore their faded colors (because Restore Fading is on in the Color tab), split them into separate frames, and number their file names to match the film frame numbers (because of how the file name option is set up in the Input tab). VueScan also scanned the same four frames at high resolution in much less time than the macOS scanning software did.
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