Cheap alternative to scanning.

[Don Hoey]

I have been off WPF for a bit as very busy on other non photographic things. A visit by Dave Mortram changed that though as he left me with his Epson V300 scanner to play with.

I have never felt the need to digitise my film pics but a play with tech that I was unfamiliar with sent me on a rummage through my old slides and negatives. The scanner has a native resolution up to 4800 dpi but from a negative or slide that gives tiffs in the order of 150mb. Scanning prints at too high a resolution, as I did, can easily produce files of 500mb plus .

I had quite a bit of fun with the scanner and that lead to thoughts of playing with some old images on dull winter days. With no way to justify buying a scanner capable of taking negs/slides up to 120 film size I thought I would make a lightbox and have a go at photographing them. This quickly took over from my other jobs as I needed to be able to do a comparison before Dave collected his Epson. Slides were obviously not going to be a problem but I needed to understand if I could handle B&W negatives and produce reasonable positives from them.

To go the route of a lightbox I needed a piece of white translucent acrylic and something to hold the negs. Both were easily solved as I have my old darkroom kit in the loft, so I am able to use the enlarger neg holder without needing to make up something, and the acrylic is from my sodium safelight. With these to hand I dug out one of Stevies round polyprop containers, and cut a hole to fit the stofen diffuser from my flash as that would provide the light to expose by, and fitted a 25watt candle bulb to the opposite side for framing and focusing. 25 watt was chosen to limit heat build up, as this could only be ventilated through holes in the side of the container. With a bunch of ventilation holes drilled, I then lined the container with scrunched then reasonably flattened kitched foil.

As expected slides were no problem but in order to get an understanding of the processing required I needed a simple image that I could scan as a reference and then be able to have on screen as I set about converting the negative image taken with the D2X. I found a 35mm Tech Pan shot of my old Bronica that only covered 1/3 of the frame, so it was ideal for that initial trial. A couple of things were immediately evident in the scanned image once I had successfully done the processing of the photographed version.
1) Despite turning off sharpening on the scanner it still managed to introduce a lot of sharpening.
2) No matter how careful I was, dust and other imperfections from the glass showed up.
3) The scanner suffers from quite serious CA on negatives and transparencies. Well I suppose that it is a budget flatbed rather than a dedicated higher end film scanner.
The comparison is attached. All this gave me the satisfaction that the output from the D2X well surpassed what a scanner that is capable of handling 120 film in a similar image quality range could achieve. As my requirement will only be occasional, so I could not justify a dedicated film scanner, I am well pleased with the result.

The next step was to send Foxy a full size frame from the D2X of a negative converted to a positive for his comment. Foxy was quite happy, so as he is my digital darkroom guru, I feel I have it cracked, so I though other members with similarly limited neg/slide copying needs may find my experience of interest.

I have put up a couple of frames taken with the D2X that are negative conversions in my gallery. Technical Pan which I used a lot, is a high resolution film, so frames from this are not really suited to gallery posting due to the large amount of compression required on subjects with a lot of detail. The image titled Albert is such an example.

Images attached :
1) The diy lightbox.
2) Comparison between the scanner and D2X version.
3) A copy of the frame I sent to Foxy at full size for comment.

Don

[miketoll]

Very interesting Don. In the old fim days one could buy an attachment to stick on the front of the camera as a makeshift slide copier, worked quite well as I recall not knowing what the quality of the inbuilt lens was like. The main bug bear was an increase in contrast which often resulted in lost detail, I do not seem to notice that with your examples but wonder how slides are affected?

[Don Hoey]

Mike,

Ahh the Ohnar slide copier.
Dave brought one over on a previous visit. Before that I have never tried one, and when we had a go with his we found we were limited by the camera crop factor. So we were not able to copy the whole slide. As our little experiment was more about seeing if we could get similar results to a scanner at smaller file sizes that sort of killed the idea off. Dave has been scanning bucket loads of stuff, but at 150mb each from the scanner we were hoping 6mb RAW each from his D70s would give comparable quality.

As most of what I wanted to play with is on B&W negative that is all I have had a go at, but I will give some trannies a try and post the results. In view of Daves file size problem I am sure he will be asking similar at some point in time.

Don

[Don Hoey]

Mike,

I have done a comparison using a slide that I scanned with Daves Epson V300 scanner.
Taken on a Nikon FM with 200mm f4 lens, and film is 35mm Kodachrome64.
My D2X exposure was by flash at 1/2 power, and the comparisons are straight with NO processing. Naturally the raw file can have any adjustments like exposure or contrast applied if required. The scanned version was at the scanners maximum resolution of 4800dpi as saved as a 16bit Tiff. Not sure what Dave will make of this as he has scanned loads of slides.

As the comparisons are screen grabs they do not reflect the true sharpness of the scan or photo versions. To example that I have attatched the photograph version that I reduced to 760 high then applied smart sharpening of Radius 0.1 Amount 80. So not much sharpening at all really.

Images attached :
1) Screen grabs of unprocessed comparisons with respective histograms.
2) Magnified versions. Note this is 1222 wide so needs opening to view properly.
3) Photo version at 760 pixels high.

Don

[yelvertoft]

An interesting set of experiments Don, and done in your inimitable style. I could not justify the cost of a dedicated film scanner, but bought a general purpose flatbed with a backlight built into the lid. It's a Canon 8400 (I think). I recall the last time I used it, avoiding colour casts and getting the contrast to be something sensible the the main problems. Both solveable in post processing, but a lot of faff. The scanner came with a set of negative holders for 35mm slide, 35mm negative and (the real reason I bought it) 120 6x6 negative. It was a cost effective way of digitising the few negs I wanted to scan from the Rolleiflex. I don't think this model is current any more, but I dare say that there are replacement models and they don't really cost much more than a general purpose scanner without backlit lid.

[miketoll]

Interesting again Don, your Nikon D2X shots are definitely better. I once borrowed an Ohnar (or similar) slide copier to make a copy of a slide onto colour print and remember being disappointed by the results at the time due to the very high contrast but your results are so much better. I have got an old dedicated slide/negative scanner and on scanning an old colour negative was amazed how much more detail could be brought out of a colour negative, especially in the shadows, compared to the standard print that came back from the processor. Your experiment is not just scanning on the cheap but excellent scanning on the cheap.

[Don Hoey]

Originally Posted by miketoll

............... old colour negative was amazed how much more detail could be brought out of a colour negative, especially in the shadows, compared to the standard print that came back from the processor.

Ahhh.... colour neg, that will be the next step. I have one where I scanned the print and the neg on Dave's machine, so that should be interesting.

Don

[Don Hoey]

Taking a break from other stuff that is keeping me busy, so I though I ought to have a go at photographing a colour negative on the lightbox.

Colour correction was obviously going to be as issue as the inverted image has a blue cast. Scanner software no doubt has a play on colour channels but I tried a simple way round using White, Black and Grey/Neutral points. Mixing colour channels has always been a problem for me to the extent that in the darkroom days I sought out a Phillips enlarger as that is additive rather than the more normal subtractive method .

I first tried W/B/N points in my fav editing program Nikon NX2, and it worked nice and easy. So a quick trial in CS and the results were the same. The opacity reductions shown in the grahic are as I applied in NX2 where the effect can be easily seen in Double Threshold. I am not sure how to do that in photoshop, so perhaps someone can give a clue here. Setting 100% on white point will easily blow light colours as in the sky in this image so some opacity reduction is required. Black point is a lot easier to judge. Positioning the Neutral point is a bit of trial and error but a second point can easily be added to remove any remaining colour cast later.

In this example the further processing steps were a small local reduction of contrast ( yellow, blue and red areas ), curves, and a touch of noise reduction to smear the grain on the fuselarge.

The negative used here is 35mm ILFOCOLOUR HR100, a film dating back to the early 1980's, so it is not quite as fine grained as the more modern Kodak Gold or Ultra.

Attatched images are the process graphics and the final result.

Don

[yelvertoft]

Final result has a lovely creamy look to it. You forget how film rendered colours, "back in the day".

[miketoll]

Creamy look is something digital seems to struggle with. You certainly get good results with your technique and a bit of work in PP Don.