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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

#51

Post by egorfine »

kataklasm wrote: post #50
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, m…

These are excellent results (albeit files are slightly overly compressed). Thank you for the insights!

> high-quality light table

What light source did you use?

> Lightroom worked best for stitching

Time to blow dust from my Autopano Pro license! (Yes, it still works on macOS 15.1 on Apple Silicon).

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

#52

Post by speakspokespok »

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…

Black card is a thin cardboard , aka card stock? Can you link to something that explains the process? It’s pertinent because I’ve got a V600.

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

#53

Post by kataklasm »

egorfine wrote: post #51
kataklasm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, m…

These are excellent results (albeit files are slightly overly compressed). Thank you for the insights! > high-quality light table What light source did you use? > Lightroom worked best for stitching Time to blow dust from my Autopano Pro license! (Yes, it still works on macOS 15.1 on Apple Silicon).

> albeit files are slightly overly compressed I agree, pretty sure the host upload is at fault here.

> What light source did you use A simple LED strip light, you know those flexible ones. They were glued on the inside (just the bottom panel) of an aluminium box 30x40x8cm and then a frosted acrylic panel was placed on top. While the light color is not that important I chose a neutral white. But I reference each scan images white balance from a reference image of the light table so it gets compensated anyway. Worked like a charm when I still shot analog. Gone digital now unfortunately as the costs just rose too quickly as a college student. Still miss my Fuji GX680 sometimes, but I'm also really happy with my Fuji X-Pro 2.

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

#54

Post by pathartl »

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…

Have you used the FlexTight line of scanners? I've been able to get really great results from my Precision II.

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

#55

Post by david38 »

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…

Wow. Blast from the past. I had both the Coolscan 9000 and LS-2000.

I now use a system from Negative Supply.

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

#56

Post by qingcharles »

YooLi wrote: post #45
qingcharles wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Honestly, the best thing out there for color correction right now (to me) is Adobe's Camera Raw feature.

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/10/14/the-adobe-adapt...

The AI denoise is fantastic, too:

https://gregbenzphotography.com/lightroom-acr/acr-17-ai-adob...

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

#57

Post by qingcharles »

speakspokespok wrote: post #52
qingcharles wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Black card is a thin cardboard , aka card stock? Can you link to something that explains the process? It’s pertinent because I’ve got a V600.

Yep! Just card stock. For some reason having a white backing behind the image causes worse scans when the bright light can penetrate the image you're scanning and gets reflected internally off that white sheet. I always just put a thin piece of black cardstock on top of everything I scanned.

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

#58

Post by jazzyjackson »

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…

Ooo I never thought about the issue of stitching blank space together. I wonder if film grain makes it trivial for the alignment algo.

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

#59

Post by sdflhasjd »

enthdegree wrote: post #28
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…

Very interesting. What camera/lens/lightbox did you use and around what DPI you achieve?

I used an A7C2 + Sony FE 50mm f2.8 macro. The lightbox was a custom build based on the design that I found linked on HN recently: https://jackw01.github.io/scanlight/. This was then mounted vertically on the toolhead of my 3D printer with the camera on a tripod, I then used the Z and X axes to scan across the negative.

Although I had success with PTGui and it "just worked", I didn't fancy paying for it and instead used Hugin in the end. This lead me to take around 63 pictures with 50% overlap.

The film was a 4x5 negative and after stitching I'd say the effective DPI was ~4500

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

#60

Post by trwhite »

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

Talking to myself but... I just don't understand the downvotes on my comment. Saying cheap film is shit offends people? It's still shit. Get over it.
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