Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.vladovince.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 62 posts

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

#41

Post by [deleted] »

qingcharles wrote: post #39
dav43 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

[deleted]

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

#42

Post by turnsout »

flimsypremise wrote: post #34
sdflhasjd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 day…

Wow, do you have a write up of your scanning setup? It sounds like it could work for scanning 4x5 and 8x10.

I’m also curious about your comments on the light source. Although you’re 100% correct about the way the wavelengths are specified in the data sheets, the reality has always been different. When I was printing color in the darkroom, our enlargers were very basic lights with subtractive color filters. Dedicated film scanners used either fluorescent or basic LED backlights. Have you run into color reproduction trouble that you’re sure relates to the illuminant or sensor response curves?

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

#43

Post by jeffbee »

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…

The other nice thing about the higher end Coolscan would have been the relative triviality of hooking up a FireWire peripheral to that Mac mini M4 shown in the pictures, or even USB with the midrange LS-5000.

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

#44

Post by jeffbee »

phony-account wrote: post #26

The ‘antiqueness’ and alleged difficulty of scanning with Nikon Coolscans is very overstated in this article. I’m using a Coolscan 9000 with a single adapter on an M3 Pro MacBook running Sequoia (latest MacOS). No exotic hardware needed whatsoever.

I'm curious about this adapter since I've never seen a single-stage USB-C to FireWire.

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

#45

Post by YooLi »

qingcharles wrote: post #39
dav43 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Any pointers on the post-processing software? Anything to correct red-tinted slide scans?

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

#46

Post by 10729287 »

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…

Thank you very much for all those informations. I kind of agree. It's a nice retrocomputing adventure but that doesn't seem that efficient. But eh, we know process is very important for us film shooters, so if he enjoys, it's mission complete to me. I used to painfully scan bw negatives with Epson flat scanner 15 years ago and the experience was awful. I just bought an EASY35 from Valoi to dig backinto my films with a 70mm Macro from SIGMA on Lumix S5. So far it's very impressive. Focusing straight on the grain is a dream. Is it the setup you use now ?

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

#47

Post by DidYaWipe »

jnovek wrote: post #31
DidYaWipe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, it's another one of those products that inexplicably collected cachet and reputation but was trash in reality.

I had a VCR of similar reputation, which also suffered from a noise-filled image coincidentally (the Panasonic AG-1960).

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

#48

Post by cesaref »

jrockway wrote: post #24
cesaref wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, from my experience of going both seriously digital and seriously darkroom, i'd keep the two apart. Get a lovely 5x4 enlarger (or join a darkroom where one is available) and you'll enjoy making B&W prints from those negatives much more than you'll enjoy scanning them and looking at them on a screen.

I don't really shoot film for the away-from-the-computer experience. Nobody is going to come over to my apartment to view my photos, and I'm not going to carry them around to show people. The main reason I shoot film is for higher resolution than digital. I can easily get 100 megapixels from my 4x5 negatives. I have a nice shot of the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn, and you can zoom in on the TIFF and read the road s…

Yeah, if resolution is your thing, then you have unfortunately little option without spending proper money for medium format digital. It's worth it though, if you find yourself with the budget for a phase one or a fuji system!

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

#50

Post by kataklasm »

egorfine wrote: post #49

I am looking at his DSLR vs scanner pictures and I cannot believe my eyes. Do DSLR "scans" of film really look that bad or the author has done a suboptimal scan with the camera?

Yea this is definitely a setup issue. Everything looks soft in his DSLR scans, probably an issue with the depth of field. I used to DSLR-scan 6x8 medium format and while it was a major PITA the results were phenomenal [1,2]. With stitching and a high enough magnification you can easily pull up to 800 Megapixels or more out of medium format frames. Without a 1:1 magnification (while the lens was able to magnify 1:1, my setup wasn't able to accomodate the focus distance adequately so I was more in the ballpark of 1:1.8 or 1:2) I was able to stitch frames into 300+ Megapixel images with about 16 or 20 individual images making up the mosaic.

The key to great DSLR scanning is a proper, high-quality light table (I built my own) and a high quality macro lens (high quality != expensive). Adobe Lightroom always worked best for stitching, Adobe Photoshop and others had some issues for some reason. Cleaning dust off as much as possible before taking the mosaic images is vital to reduce post-processing time.

If you've got a good workflow and don't have to scan hundreds of frames a week it's a great process that's a great deal cheaper, gives better results than even drumscanning if done properly and can be faster than having a lab scan it for you.

Here's an example of a 6x8 DSLR scan. Taken with a 20MP Sony DSLR with 60mm (90mm FF equiv) macro lens by Tamron. Downsampled to 13MP image resolution from the 300+MP scan mosaic because that original mosaic file was about half a gigabyte in size. 1: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1...

Here's one taken as a single frame with the Sony DSLR without any stitching. 2: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1...

Post reply on HN