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
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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