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My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

blog.vladovince.com

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Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

#31

Post by jnovek »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #16
flimsypremise wrote: post #15

As someone who has built multiple custom macro film scanner setups, owns basically very consumer film scanner of note (including the Coolscan 9000 and the Minolta Scan Multi Pro), and is intimately familiar with the workings of various film scanners and science of digitizing film, I don't think this article provides particularly good advice. Just for instance, the LS-2000 features in the post has an advertised optica…

Also, the LS-2000 is a noisy POS. I owned this thing for years (bought new) and put plenty of time into it. It just sucks. It was only mediocre for slides and black-&-white negatives; for color negatives it was nearly useless. You could never remove the base negative color and retain good image color. The dynamic range sucked. I sold it on eBay years ago, then researched what might be better. The general opinion was…

B&Ws also scan poorly on it if the negatives are even a little bit dense. Tricky negatives that could still produce good images in the darkroom had no hope on the LS-2000.

Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

#32

Post by jnovek »

trwhite wrote: post #23

Film photography just became prohibitively costly for me around ~2018. When a roll of 120 was costing £20/25 in the UK. A lot of the good labs over here (Peak Imaging for example) went bust too. I poke fun at film shooters today who heap praise on e.g. Kodak Gold or the cheap Fuji equivalents because it's all they can really afford/get their hands on. I wouldn't have even considered shooting it 10 years ago

I shoot cheap color film (and have for almost 20 years) because I like the conspicuous grain pattern. Likewise I shoot quite a bit of 5222 which I develop in rodinal.

Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

#33

Post by msisk6 »

geephroh wrote: post #22
BuildTheRobots wrote: post #20

Got to shout out to VueScan for making obsolete scanners usable on modern operating systems. It's not free, but is reasonably priced. If you can physically connect your scanner (scsi2usb is an exercise left to the reader), then it's likely to let you use it.

+1000 for VueScan. And they have perpetual licensing -- take that, Adobe.

My current Vuescan license is from 1999. And I think that one was just to replace an older serial due to some upgrade on their end. It's probably the most bang for the buck of any software I've actually purchased.

I don't do much scanning anymore, but I do have an ancient Nikon CoolScan 35mm scanner that's probably at least 20 years old now. I get it out every few years to scan something I found and, with Vuescan, it still works remarkably well.

Although the last time I fetched it out from a storage container by our barn (I really should store it in the house) I found the negative strip scanner wasn't working anymore, but the slide adapter did and that was good enough for the task at hand.

Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

#34

Post by flimsypremise »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #27
enthdegree wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digitizing film seems to be a perennial pain point. As far as I know there is no mostly-automated option to scan multiple film formats at high resolution besides paying someone with very expensive equipment to do it for you. The obsolete equipment like those models you mentioned involves a lot of fastidious labor per-frame and is generally pretty awful. Modern equipment has similar warts. Flatbed scanners are bad fil…

I see you mentioned using a 3D printer for scanning medium format film. I did something similar, but took the opposite approach. I placed the film on a lightbox and mounted that to the printer, then had that move around in front of a camera with macro lens. I did not have much of a problem with alignment. That being said, this was a one-off, but once I had enough overlap with each capture, PTGui was able to switch it…

I've been doing something similar. I started with a 3D printer approach, then two cheap aliexpress C-beam linear actuators and finally managed to acquire a 2-axis microscope stage for cheap. The key I have found is that any issues with alignment can actually be solved with focus-stitching.

The real problem with most scanning setups is actually getting accurate color out of color negatives. The common wisdom these days is to use high-CRI light, but I believe that approach is flawed. Film scanning is not an imaging challenge, but a rather a densitometric one. You don't actually want to take a photo of the negative in a broad spectrum because the dyes in photo negatives were never intended to be used in a broad-spectrum context. You actually need to sample the density of the dye layers at very specific wavelengths determined by a densitometric standard (status M) that was designed specifically for color negative film. Doing this with a standard digital camera with a bayer sensor is... non trivial and requires characterizing the sensor response in a variety of ways.

Basically the hardware is easy, the software is hard.

Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

#35

Post by actionfromafar »

trwhite wrote: post #23

Film photography just became prohibitively costly for me around ~2018. When a roll of 120 was costing £20/25 in the UK. A lot of the good labs over here (Peak Imaging for example) went bust too. I poke fun at film shooters today who heap praise on e.g. Kodak Gold or the cheap Fuji equivalents because it's all they can really afford/get their hands on. I wouldn't have even considered shooting it 10 years ago

Black and white film is still dirt cheap. Even colour film isn't that expensive now, adjusted for inflation.

Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

#36

Post by dav43 »

flimsypremise wrote: post #15

As someone who has built multiple custom macro film scanner setups, owns basically very consumer film scanner of note (including the Coolscan 9000 and the Minolta Scan Multi Pro), and is intimately familiar with the workings of various film scanners and science of digitizing film, I don't think this article provides particularly good advice. Just for instance, the LS-2000 features in the post has an advertised optica…

You seem knowledgeable in this space. I’ve researched scanners for only scanning old prints but get mixed messages. What would be your advice on a scanner for this purpose to get 90% good enough… epson 650/700?

Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

#37

Post by positus »

trwhite wrote: post #23

Film photography just became prohibitively costly for me around ~2018. When a roll of 120 was costing £20/25 in the UK. A lot of the good labs over here (Peak Imaging for example) went bust too. I poke fun at film shooters today who heap praise on e.g. Kodak Gold or the cheap Fuji equivalents because it's all they can really afford/get their hands on. I wouldn't have even considered shooting it 10 years ago

Yeah bought some Ultramax 400 last week. Two rolls….$25. Yikes. Might switch to bulk rolling soonish. Portra 400 is about 16-18/roll at the moment. It’s crazy.

Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

#39

Post by qingcharles »

dav43 wrote: post #36
flimsypremise wrote: post #15

As someone who has built multiple custom macro film scanner setups, owns basically very consumer film scanner of note (including the Coolscan 9000 and the Minolta Scan Multi Pro), and is intimately familiar with the workings of various film scanners and science of digitizing film, I don't think this article provides particularly good advice. Just for instance, the LS-2000 features in the post has an advertised optica…

You seem knowledgeable in this space. I’ve researched scanners for only scanning old prints but get mixed messages. What would be your advice on a scanner for this purpose to get 90% good enough… epson 650/700?

At a sane price? The Epsons.

https://epson.com/For-Work/Scanners/Photo-and-Graphics/Epson...

It has a white panel on the inside of the lid which ruins a lot of scans. I always put black card on top of my scans.

That's probably the best scanner for photos. And I used to own a $25K Hasselblad too.

Make sure you clean the platten and the photos before scanning to save hassle later on dust removal.

I used those Epsons for scanning tens of thousands of old photos.

Start with a good scan, and there is so much good post-processing software out there now to help correct fading etc on old images.

Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

#40

Post by washadjeffmad »

WWLink wrote: post #5
ginko wrote: post #4

Nikon CoolScan devices work flawlessly with SANE on modern linux btw.

Linux scanner support is amazing. I have a >10 year old printer/scanner/fax machine that I still use for scanning and faxing sometimes. Getting scanning to work in modern MacOS or Windows is ... an adventure. It's possible! But an adventure for sure. I was delighted when I opened the scanner tool in fedora/gnome for laughs and it showed the (networked) machine as a scanning source. And I selected it. AND IT WORKED. I…

In general, if there aren't Image Capture drivers, then older, largely 32-bit scan software won't work on Catalina or newer. It's kind of a gamble, and you sometimes have to manually run the device file from the image capture directory to get it to properly load the driver.

I remember the only challenge getting my TMA flatbed scanner working with Ubuntu Studio in 2010 was downloading an extra xsane package.

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