35mm film workf(s)low for Asher and anyone interested

[Mike Shimwell]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Shimwell
Ah yes, you need an efficient scanning workflow I managed to buy a second hand adaptor for my Nikon that lets me put a whole roll through at once, so I can set it up and leave it to run scaning at 4000dpi. If there are any that warrant special treatment I then repeat the scan on individual frames. This is much easier.

Which Nikon scanner are you using and is this one continuous roll of the film or else is it a block of transparencies?


Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Shimwell
Lightroom is proving an excellent tool to deal with film scans.

Asher
In what special way?


Mike

(subject intentionally soft!!)


Asher
I like the atmospherics of the place made by having the b.g. in focus. What lens is this. It seems as wide as a 24mm lens? This is an interesting reversal in ways of setting things up and I'd like to see more examples. Was the difference made in the shot or in LR?

Asher


Hi Asher

I thought I'd post a response here to avoid taking over Cem's thread.

I'm scanning 35mm using a Nikon Coolscan 5000. I bought this because I realised early on that if I was going to work with film at all I'd need to be able to scan efficiently(!)

The 5000 comes with an adaptor that can scan strips of 6 frames, but there is also a (very expensive) adaptor available that can scan up to 40 frames on a roll at once. I was fortunate to find a secondhand one on ebay fairly quickly. The downside of the auto adaptors is that they crop the top and bottom frame edge slightly and also that if the film is curled along the ength of the roll the edges are out of focus.

The auto scans are perfectly fine for small prints and album snaps etc, but if I want to take an image further I tend to rescan the single frame using the FH3 adaptor which holds each edge fairly well and has a bigger scannning window. Before doing this I cut the roll up into strips of 6 frames.

Hence my current workflow is to develop and scan the whole roll uncut. The roll is then cut and stored. The first scans are reviewed using Bridge and any selects for rescanning are done individually (prints for the family album are just corrected and printed without rescanning).

All the files I want to keep are then imported into LR2 as 16 bit tiffs. LR2 works well wiith film as the combination of controllable sharpening (masking is excellent) and colour noise reduction allows me to get a look that I like - still film, but without sharpening the grain. The colour correction and light controls are also excellent for use with film scans.

As an aside, if I am scanning B&W film digital ice doesn't work, but I can still import to LR2, work on the image and then clean updust etc by editing the original in CS4 where the healing brush/clone tools are much more useful than the LR equivalent.

The scans I get are much better starting points than the Fuji scans I've had, which come with too much correction, burnt out highlights and black shadows (all fine on the Nikon scans) and a rather unpleasant texture.


Finally the picture was shot with my Ikon using a Voigtlander Super Wide Heliar 15mm lens - scale focus only, but wide open inside on Portra 160VC. Sue was lit by window light and the balance was fortunate - this is a straight scan with only sharpening and a bit of brightness before resizing.

Mike
__________________

 

[Mike Shimwell]

And a couple more for fun

Portra 160VC

50mm C-sonnar

and some boats on Ektar 100 - getting dark for the second

15mm Super Wide Heliar

35mm Ultron or 50 sonnar

Mike

 

[Asher Kelman]

and some boats on Ektar 100 - getting dark for the second

15mm Super Wide Heliar

Mike,

This I like especially as it is sculptural, has magnificent colors and there's a history to it rhat one can think about. The 15mm Superwide heliar is a remarkable lens and available new for just $399! Consider how much one would pay for such an optic for a DSLR!

Thanks for the work flow Mike. I wonder how the Nikon 5000 stacks against the Minolta offerings.

Asher

 

[Daniel Buck]

is it just me, or are all of those images soft? Maybe it's the down-sizing algorithm, or maybe they need a touch of sharpening on the web-size images?

 

[Mike Shimwell]

HI Daniel

Yes, I realised later that I'd used an old downsize action that blurs too much before downsizing. The originals are all nice and print well. I may ry to swap them over later if I get a few minutes.

Mike

 

[Mike Shimwell]

Quick update

Just a quick note to add that, of late, I've been working direct from Bridge to CS4 for film images. In part this is because I've shot a lot more black and white than colour, but also because I've been using a high pass sharpening workflow for the black and white work that seems more effective (with a bit of care) than the LR2 implementation.

It also leaves me with the ability to dodge, burn, tone etc on curves layers before finalising the print file.

Mike

 

[fahim mohammed]

Mike, Asher all film lovers....the thread for me...will take my time going thru it.

Thanks folks.

 

[Mike Shimwell]

A further slightly more detailed update focused on the Nikon 5000.


I've concluded that the optimum everyday settings for most films with the Nikon are to scan at 4,000 ppi (because of the way the Nikon works you don't seem to reduce grain aliasing by scanning at a lower resolution), 16 bit, and using 4 pass scanning in general. 16 pass may be useful for kodachrome sometimes as it has very dense blacks. If you want smaller files you can downsize after scanning.

After scanning save as a tiff and you will normally want to apply some capture sharpening. Photokit sharpener works OK on chromes, but is not very good at black and white. I now use a high pass routine that requires a duplicate layer, a slight (0.5 to 1.5 pixel depending on film) blur and then a high pass filter (3 to 10 pixels radius). This is blended in hard light mode with an opacity of 10% to 30%. The middle of these ranges will give an OK result for most images and normal (ie. not big) print sizes.

Other processes that I use on the scan are a convert to black and white layer, occasionally levels, but this is not usually necessary if you're scanning with autoexposure in Nikonscan, and then masked curves layers to set overall contrast and any dodge/burn I want to do. I often tone the final image with another curves layer using the individual colour channel curves.

Finally, for web downsizing after saving your master image and flattening the layers. Zoom to actual pixels (100%), Gaussian blur 0.5 to 1.5 pixels, resize using bicubic sharper to the required pixel dimensions, use smart sharpen with 0.2 to 0.3 radius and 80 to 150 intensity - just make it look nice - and then convert to sRGB colour space if it's not already in that space, convert from 16 bit mode to 8-bit mode and savea as a jpg (try to not save over the tiff you just scanned and optimised... I've done it).

Hope that helps,

Mike

 

[Mike Shimwell]

I've just been catching up on some of the undeveloped rolls of film (!) and wanted to make some quick family album prints. I set up a very simple action to crop out the edges and desaturate the 16-bit tiffs from a roll scan and printed a set of 6 by 4s through Qimage onto Ilford GOld Fibre Silk - rgb mode on my HP Z3100, which works really well.

I haven'[t done any post dry cleaning, so there are a few drying marks, but for a quick and very simple automated process they do well for album snaps. The tonality is straight from the scan.

A couple of samples.

Mike