Scanning Torture (or Learning to Love Your Digital Camera)

Minolta scanners, scanner support and replacement choices
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bakubo
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Re: Scanning Torture (or Learning to Love Your Digital Camer

Unread post by bakubo »

Dusty, that scan of a Kodachrome 25 slide dupe looks pretty good. It has a pretty strong blue cast that could be fixed to make it look even better, I think. I suppose the original Kodachrome 8 slides are lost?

A side note. Yesterday I found another big box of film that was hidden away that I didn't go through to scan when I was doing that recently. I would guess there are about 500 slides and about 1500 negatives in the box. Things have changed though in the last few weeks so I am no longer in a position to do more scanning right now so I will try to do it sometime in the future. I thought I was done. :(
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bakubo
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Re: Scanning Torture (or Learning to Love Your Digital Camer

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Bob Janes wrote:I've tried the route of shooting nagatives with a macro lens using a sheet of perspex and backlighting with flash - it is very quick (and is the only way I have of doing medium format negatives), but it can be very difficult to get a full tonal range - I find my Scan Dual II with VuScan gets more out of the hadows and highlights.
If you have a bunch of MF negatives then you might want to get a flatbed scanner with a film attachment. The Epson V600 is less than $200 and can do a decent job for MF negatives (probably use Vuescan for better results). The V500 is even less expensive. The Epson V700 and V750 are much more expensive, but are even better. I suspect the V600 or V500 would be pretty satisfying though for MF negatives.
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Dusty
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Re: Scanning Torture (or Learning to Love Your Digital Camer

Unread post by Dusty »

bakubo wrote:Dusty, that scan of a Kodachrome 25 slide dupe looks pretty good. It has a pretty strong blue cast that could be fixed to make it look even better, I think. I suppose the original Kodachrome 8 slides are lost?
:(
Not really lost. My uncle died in '09, and my aunt in 11. My cousins - who always seemed to depend upon me for taking photos after their Dad 'retired', dumped everything into a big box. I asked to be able to go thru and scan them, but other events got in the way. I may be able to become the designated guardian of them, as they'll never do any thing with them, and they know I eventually will.

He was very meticulous about saving everything, even all the old negatives. Back in the '80's or 90's I did a bunch of reprints for him, that's where these came from. I did have to soak all the negs in whetting solution, as he had kept them tightly wound and secured by rubber-band. Just soaked them for awhile, and hung them with weighted film clips to straighten them out. Some I put into negative holders, but I bet the majority I re-rolled loosely without rubber-bands.

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bakubo
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Re: Scanning Torture (or Learning to Love Your Digital Camer

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Dusty wrote:My cousins - who always seemed to depend upon me for taking photos after their Dad 'retired', dumped everything into a big box.
Ahh, that is my organization system for my old film also. :lol: I've got a bunch of boxes of various sizes that contain tons of old processing envelopes with negatives and prints. Also, a bunch of old slide boxes. In the early 1990s I thought I would try to organize things a bit better so I bought a bunch of plastic negative and slide pages and put them in several big 3-ring binders. I put some of my favorite slides in the slide pages and for the negatives if the 4 or 6 frame strip had at least one of my favorite photos on it I would put it in one of the negative pages. I sort of regret doing that because it meant those slides/negatives got separated from the others on the same roll. I have a mish mash of stuff with no organization at all. Part of the reason is just because I haven't stayed in one place for long in many years so I have had to move things around many times, put it in storage, etc. What a mess. Now that I have scanned most of the film images that I thought I would ever remotely care about things are much better.

I am disappointed I found another big cache of film though. Of the 2000 or so slides/negatives that I recently found probably I would only end up scanning 500-800, but it still requires going through them all and I can't do that now. Maybe some year in the future I will have another chance. Possibly some of them have already been scanned in years gone by, but I won't know that until I can go through it all.

My digital photos and my scanned film photos though are organized much better. All my digital and many of my scanned film photos are in Lightroom with keywords. Also, for the digital ones I can also search by date/time, camera, lens, ISO, etc. Usually I can find a particular photo in seconds. Even if I can narrow it down to just 100 photos I can then visually look through those in just a few more seconds.
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Re: Scanning Torture (or Learning to Love Your Digital Camer

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Thank you for starting this thread. My project did not go well. Scanning using Vuescan on my Dimage 5400 creates a file around 220Mb and the process is painfully slow.
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Re: Scanning Torture (or Learning to Love Your Digital Camer

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Mark K wrote:Thank you for starting this thread. My project did not go well. Scanning using Vuescan on my Dimage 5400 creates a file around 220Mb and the process is painfully slow.
Mark, have you done a lot of scanning or are you just starting out? I ask, because, as you might gather from what I have posted in this thread, scanning is a pain in the butt and I can't really recommend it as a fun activity. :lol: But, if you want some of your old slides/negatives in digital form then it may be worth the effort. Are you scanning 35mm or MF film? Color negatives, color slides, B&W negatives?

As I said somewhere in this thread, I have found that usually the results of scanning color negatives is still not as good as shooting jpegs with an old 5mp digicam or even 3mp. What are you scanning? Do you really need a 220mb file? Scanning slides is generally more satisfying, but they also are often not as good as what you can get with even an older digital camera. My old B&W negatives generally give the best results since color isn't an issue. Getting good color from scanned color negatives is really tough. Scanned color slides are often better, but sometimes it is tough with them too.

Anyway, a bit more info about what you are scanning, etc. would be useful.
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bfitzgerald
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Re: Scanning Torture (or Learning to Love Your Digital Camer

Unread post by bfitzgerald »

Kodachrome is a nightmare to scan but it can be done personally I find colour negative easier to scan (but it requires colour adjustment WB wise) B&W well depends on handling true no colour issues but no infared dust removal on those won't work.

Regarding output quality well a lot depends on the film, a decent lens and the software/scanner and operator ability. I would say though it has taken quite some time to get good at it. Some folks are freaked out by grain I'm not I like it. There is still a charm to film IMO the look is quite different digital has got a lot better the early DR nightmare much improved. It's all about the look really and well I still enjoy a bit of 35mm now and then
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Re: Scanning Torture (or Learning to Love Your Digital Camera)

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bakubo wrote: The quality of the raw files from the 10mp tiny sensor in my Canon S95 are so much better in every way. Although some may say the dynamic range is less, maybe a lot less, than color negative film I have found that in practical terms it is much better. As long as you are scanning to convert the analog film to a digital file then the result, in my experience, is less usable dynamic range than what I can get by shooting in raw with a tiny sensor digital. I can shoot for the highlights and bring up the shadows with the digital and still get better results than scanning color negatives. The color is also so much better it isn't even worth comparing. The noise/grain is also so much better it isn't worth comparing. The S95 at ISO 1600 or 3200 is probably better than scanning ASA 100 color negative film. Actually, even jpegs are better too. Another actually: my old 5mp Minolta D7i is better. I would much rather have a 5mp jpeg from the D7i than a 10mp scan of a color negative (also a color slide). Oh, the 10mp file from the scanner probably has no more than 5mp of real, useful data in it for most color negative scans since they are pretty noisy/grainy. The Scan Elite is a pretty good film scanner (cost me $1000 several years ago) and Vuescan gets even more out of it. I always scan using multi-sampling to reduce noise a bit more. A different scanner in some cases might be marginally better, but not much. It is just the limitations of converting analog film to digital.

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My wife and I were in Seoul, Korea a few weeks ago and, of course, I took some photos. I was only in Korea once before back in 1997 so I decided yesterday and today to go to my archived, big 64-bit scan files of color negatives and use Vuescan to make tiffs, do some preparation and improvement of those files, and then I imported them into Lightroom. It reminded me how much variation there is in the quality of color negative scans that I have done over the years. These were all developed in Tokyo and the developing was excellent because Japanese, as usual, take great care. The negatives did not have any small scratches or other imperfections that I have run into pretty often scanning color negatives that I processed at various places in the U.S. and Europe over the decades, even though they were in plastic film sleeves. The worst are 2 batches of rolls (hundreds of photos) I had developed in Perugia, Italy and later in Paris, France when we spent 4 months traveling in Europe in 2001 (Greece, Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, England). Probably, bad/old chemicals, maybe improper development time/temperature, scratches, emulsion flaws, chemical spots, etc. Those take tons of work in Photoshop trying to repair them. In contrast the ones I worked on since yesterday which were developed here in Japan required very little work.

Still, I would much prefer even a jpeg from my 5mp Minolta D7i than a color negative scan. Looks better too and easier to work with. :)
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