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"scanning" with a digital camera?

Is it worth to try to shoot 35mm negatives with my Mamiya/PhaseOne P25 ?

I got a nice NIKONOS under water rangefinder and want to shoot some cNegs (e6 is difficult to get it developed anymore where I am..)
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Is it worth to try to shoot 35mm negatives with my Mamiya/PhaseOne P25 ?

I got a nice NIKONOS under water rangefinder and want to shoot some cNegs (e6 is difficult to get it developed anymore where I am..)
Hi Leonardo,

I did all that and more, albeit using a 5D (35 mm full frame).

Short answer, this is not doable if you want to shoot color negatives. B&W is a better choice. Slides are doable as well.

The reasons are:
1) Color negatives have an orange mask color, which is variable from film roll to film roll. So converting the negative in PS is not simply a matter of inverting it. You must color balance first for the mask and then convert. I did a lot of trials even using plug-ins which are supposed to deal with the orange mask, but nothing has given any satisfactory results.
2) You must use a sharp macro lens and do a very elaborate setup with aligning the camera with the film, backlighting the film using a stable light source, etc. A real p.i.t.a.
3) Dust and scratch correction using the IR channel as the pro scanners do is not possible. Lots of manual work to be done in PS.
4) Multiple exposure blending is not automated as with the dedicated scanners. Also, the slides tend to block up in shadows and highlights very easily.
5) Did I mention how much hassle it was? It really is.

So, my advice is to stay away from it. Keep the negatives safe till you can get them scanned at a pro scanning location later. Or if you really need to scan a lot, spend a few hundred bucks and buy a scanner. Even a cheap flatbed one such as Epson 4490 or Canon 8800 will give better results and save hours of effort on your part.

HTH,

Cheers,
 
Thanks, I was needing someone to reminding me about all of that, I think that I could shoot negs and get prints and save them for scanning later. They have an Imacon at My Own Color Lab in NY, so when I'm there I can do it with it all at once...
 
If you've got a decent macro lens, try it, and you may be surprised. High end copy work is done with MF or LF scanning backs all the time.

I recently picked up a Canon 40D mainly for copy work, but just for the heck of it, I decided to try and see if I could get it to match or do better than my circa-1999 Minolta Dimage Scan Dual (I) 35mm film scanner, and I succeeded, but it wasn't easy, as Cem states. With a copy stand, 5000K lightbox, careful alignment with a bubble level, a Canon FD 35mm/f:2.8 Macrophoto lens (a lens designed for high magnification like a Zeiss Luminar or Leitz Photar), and a 9 panel stitch using Photomerge in CS2, I could get a 7334x4975 pixel file that's unquestionably sharper corner to corner than the scanner can produce, and the file is more than twice the size of the scanner's maximum file size.

A 9 panel stitch may seem like a lot, but I tried a 4-panel stitch and that required some manual adjustment. 9 panels have enough overlap to work in Photomerge with no manual fiddling.

Here's the slide I used as a test. The softness in the near corner is on the film--I was shooting handheld close to wide open in a museum, so it's a DOF issue and perhaps a bad choice of focal point on my part--

DinoTest,40D,FD35mmMacrophoto,9PanelPhotomerge.jpg


And here's a 100% crop from the center--

DinoTest,40D,FD35mmMacrophoto,9PanelPhotomerge,dtl.jpg


It's a bit of a project to scan this way, but since my digital camera basically lives on a copystand and I don't need to scan lots of film (I normally print traditionally), it's not so difficult for me, and for some things like scanning documents, which I do lots of, a digicam on a copy stand with lights is much faster than a flatbed scanner. I'm also going to need to upgrade Photoshop to be able to do 16-bit Photomerge, but meanwhile, my scanner is only 8-bit, so I'm still ahead with the DSLR.

Another attraction of using a camera as a scanner for me is that I'm not limited by format size. I can digitize any size print or negative (my largest negative formats are 7x17" and 11x14"), and with stitching I can have as much resolution as I have patience for.

I don't shoot a lot of color neg, so I haven't figured out how to do that yet, but I believe I can import a file into Vuescan, and then use Vuescan to do the basic conversion, and then fine tune in Photoshop.
 
I don't shoot a lot of color neg, so I haven't figured out how to do that yet, but I believe I can import a file into Vuescan, and then use Vuescan to do the basic conversion, and then fine tune in Photoshop.

The main obstacle is to get rid of the mask by adjusting the color of the lightsource. Don't try doing it afterwards in Photoshop, the blue and green channels will be lacking. The lighting can be adjusted on some unexposed edge area which shows only masked base density.

Bart
 
The main obstacle is to get rid of the mask by adjusting the color of the lightsource. Don't try doing it afterwards in Photoshop, the blue and green channels will be lacking. The lighting can be adjusted on some unexposed edge area which shows only masked base density.

Bart

I like that approach, Bart, and will give it a go when I have an excuse to scan some color neg (where did I put those Ektar 100 tests?). A scanner in general doesn't change the color of the light source for color neg, but I think it would likely produce a better result.
 
I like that approach, Bart, and will give it a go when I have an excuse to scan some color neg (where did I put those Ektar 100 tests?). A scanner in general doesn't change the color of the light source for color neg, but I think it would likely produce a better result.

You might be surprized at what Vuescan can make a scanner do! It even allows to vary the R/G/B exposure ratios on many scanners by varying the scan/integration time for the differently filtered scan lines.

Anyway, for a single exposure one must filter the lightsource, or use three differently exposed channels from three shots after alignment. The latter is a lot of hassle, changing the light color is much easier.

Bart
 
At least for the setup and alignment there is a relatively easy and inexpensive solution, a slide copier like the Bowens Illumitran, which has an integrated diffused flash, and a copy stand to attach your camera to. It works for copying slides, although dust and scratches are a major problem. I do not know if there were any filters for copying negatives? Other forum members speak highly of the vuescan scanning software, maybe it could be tricked into taking the orange tint out of digital camera images as well? There are Photoshop-plugins that do that, maybe this would be a solution, although Cem considered them unsatisfactory.

Christoph

PS: I am surprised that E-6 is difficult to come by, I hope it will be some time before this spreads to my part of the world.
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Vuescan to the rescue :)

Hi Christoph,

I guess I may have good news. For a long while, I was looking for a viable solution to convert my color negative pictures taken with a DLSR to positive and getting rid of the orange mask in the process. There were some possibilities to do it manually in PS or use a plug-in for that purpose, but none to my satisfaction. Thanks to your and Bart's reactions, all of a sudden I have realized that what I was looking for so long was right there under my nose all this time. It is Vuescan which saves the day, again. Let me explain the procedure which is simple and automated fairly easily.
1) Take a picture of the color negative with the DSLR (raw is preferred)
2) Open the picture in Vuescan using the Source: File option and choose as the media: Color negative.
3) Scan normally using Vuescan as if the original was the film scanner instead of the DSLR.
4) Vuescan does the mask removal perfectly and I get good color balanced images. Yippee!

The only difference to the real world film scanning is that automatic corrrection of dust and scratches (such as FARE or Digital ICE) but that can be tackled using an action script in photoshop.

I am a very happy puppy indeed :).

Cheers,
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Cem,

This is marvelous.

I'd love to know your entire setup but first more on Vuescan.

He.
3) Scan normally using Vuescan as if the original was the film scanner instead of the DSLR.
What do you mean? Vuescan is connected to what? How can a file be "scanned"? What do you tell Vuescan it's connected to? normally one specifies a particular scanner.

Asher
 
Cem,

This is marvelous.

I'd love to know your entire setup but first more on Vuescan.


What do you mean? Vuescan is connected to what? How can a file be "scanned"? What do you tell Vuescan it's connected to? normally one specifies a particular scanner.

Hi Asher,

Vuescan can 'scan' a file, as if it is receiving data from a scanner. It can scan a TIFF file which holds the original Raw data from a scan, a so called Digital negative, from an earlier scanning session without you physically having to handle the film anymore. But it can also import a Raw file as data source, and process that just like it would process scanner data.

Cem has shot some negatives with his digital camera, and he can let Vuescan process the camera Raw files, have it remove the orange mask, invert, and gamma adjust the shot. It's much more efficient than fiddling about in Photoshop. The camera can shoot a 35mm frame at almost 4000 PPI resolution if you use a macro lens at 1:1. Image quality isn't as good as from a dedicated film scanner, but it's quite usable.

One thing that would further help the image quality in this kind of setup is shooting the negatives with a filtered lightsource to 'remove' most of the mask's color.

Cheers,
Bart
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Hi Asher,

Vuescan can 'scan' a file, as if it is receiving data from a scanner. It can scan a TIFF file which holds the original Raw data from a scan, a so called Digital negative, from an earlier scanning session without you physically having to handle the film anymore. But it can also import a Raw file as data source, and process that just like it would process scanner data.

Cem has shot some negatives with his digital camera, and he can let Vuescan process the camera Raw files, have it remove the orange mask, invert, and gamma adjust the shot. It's much more efficient than fiddling about in Photoshop. The camera can shoot a 35mm frame at almost 4000 PPI resolution if you use a macro lens at 1:1. Image quality isn't as good as from a dedicated film scanner, but it's quite usable.

One thing that would further help the image quality in this kind of setup is shooting the negatives with a filtered lightsource to 'remove' most of the mask's color.

Cheers,
Bart
Yep, exactly what Bart has already said :)

Cheers,
 
Thanks for explaining it so clearly, I will have a go at it sometime. I would be very grateful, if you could also explain the actionscript for taking dust and scratches in Photoshop.

Christoph
 

Erie Patsellis

pro member
This is precisely the workflow I've been working on with my Bogen Dual Mode Slide duplicator and my SLR/n.

Early results seem quite favorable, being able to scan 6x7 and 6x6 is a bonus. Not a bad $45 investment for the Slide Duplicator .

erie
 
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