A big film scanner thread

Just found this playlist of Youtube videos from Jamie Maldonado on DSLR scanning. I've only watched the first one, but a couple of interesting insights already: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrCzfXJaBhpC62t8UHnSIyGsK8WArNo2Q

EDIT: Jamie uses a D800 on a copystand. An interesting comment: better to do it in darkness, reduces the effect of reflections.
 
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Interesting post by Ronald Thain from Glasgow (who used to work drum scanners) on his efforts to use camera scanning for 135, and some comments comparing the results to those from an Epson 4990: https://idreamedof.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/scanning-35mm-film-with-a-digital-camera/

EDIT: Ronald uses an APSC CSC, with a jury-rigged macro bellows unit. He talks about the various setups he's used and shows some results. A comment: he doesn't think there's much more than 20 Mpixels in a 135 film frame.
 
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I find this interest in DSLR scanning quite puzzling. Loads of noise on the internet about it, loads of overpriced film holders, repro stands, light table, inversion software.

Then you check out some actual results and _personally_ I haven't been able to find one decent example of a correctly scanned negative using a DSLR. Uneven focusing, uneven lighting, poor colour inversions. Not to mention the real estate and investment needed to put together one of these set ups. Sure, once you put the setup together, it is faster to crank through 36 frames of a roll I'll concede that.

Also - I think a comparison between a flatbed and a DSLR scan, such as the Epson 4990 above, is an unfair comparison as far as 35mm is concerned. I wish more people realised a simple, tiny £200 dedicated film scanner can, when used correctly, produce results that will blow away most of the DSLR scans you see on flickr/instagram. The results obtained, for example by Nigel on this forum are a testament to that.

I'm going to say something quite controversial: Plustek 35mm scanners are great. Used Nikon Coolscan/Minolta Scan Dual scanners are great. You can get amazing film scans from these; they're tiny devices, they don't cost an arm and a leg.

Wondering if DSLR scanning is more like a hobby in itself.
 
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Well, @trypdal I do think DSLR scanning is interesting, but by and large I'm with you, it's not something I want to do as my normal workflow (and not just because I don' have a DSLR!). But if, for example, you're starting to get into film, say MF or LF, and don't have a scanner, it's surely something you'd want to explore...
 
I thought this video by Nick Carver comparing a DSLR scan, an Epson scan and a drum scan on some 6x17 negatives and transparencies is really interesting. The DSLR scan doesn't get his vote, but TBH quite a lot of that's due to the 6x17 frames meaning he had to use panorama stitching techniques with the DSLR scans.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9d8BukUgzI


I'll try to add these links into appropriate earlier posts when I get a chance.
 
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trypdal said:
I wish more people realised a simple, tiny £200 dedicated film scanner can produce results that will blow away most of the DSLR scans you see on flickr/instagram
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My experience is entirely different to yours. I've found that using a camera provides me with scans that are entirely acceptable for my needs. I've also found that using a camera is much quicker than any of the several scanners I've used.
 
Apologies everyone for temporarily hijacking an incredibly useful technical thread with personal opinions -

Andrew, I agree with you in that DSLRs are entirely 'acceptable' as a means to scan film, for many. I also agree that they're a faster method if the whole workflow is set up correctly. Importantly, as ChrisR says, if one already has a DSLR lying around - then yes, by all means why not.

However - I might be wrong but I see something else at play here. If you briefly check online film photography communities you'll notice an increasing number of people vehemently 'banging the drum' of DSLR scanning. From what I've seen this is at times full-blown zealotry. I've read very violent replies on Photrio, for example, to youtube comparison videos such as the one posted by Chris above. The owner and designer of a negative inversion software tool regularly writes on many film photography facebook groups to promote his (expensive) tool, advertising it as the only way to achieve the best from your film photography scanning workflow. This is, to me, concerning.

I just think that the idea that one should *need* a digital DSLR and an expensive array of accessories to somehow 'get the best' out of a film photography workflow is pernicious.
 
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trypdal said:
I find this interest in DSLR scanning quite puzzling. Loads of noise on the internet about it, loads of overpriced film holders, repro stands, light table, inversion software.

Then you check out some actual results and _personally_ I haven't been able to find one decent example of a correctly scanned negative using a DSLR. Uneven focusing, uneven lighting, poor colour inversions. Not to mention the real estate and investment needed to put together one of these set ups. Sure, once you put the setup together, it is faster to crank through 36 frames of a roll I'll concede that.

Also - I think a comparison between a flatbed and a DSLR scan, such as the Epson 4990 above, is an unfair comparison as far as 35mm is concerned. I wish more people realised a simple, tiny £200 dedicated film scanner can produce results that will blow away most of the DSLR scans you see on flickr/instagram. The results obtained, for example by Nigel on this forum are a testament to that.

I'm going to say something quite controversial: Plustek 35mm scanners are great. Used Nikon Coolscan/Minolta Scan Dual scanners are great. You can get amazing film scans from these; they're tiny devices, they don't cost an arm and a leg.

Wondering if DSLR scanning is more like a hobby in itself.
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I found the opposite, I had a digital camera and macro lens, so it made sense to try it. I have made slightly better results on 35mm b&w than the Plustek 8200 and much better on 35mm slide film. But that's just me. Each to their own, we can all use what suits us best.
 
trypdal said:
I just think that the idea that one should *need* a digital DSLR and an expensive array of accessories to somehow 'get the best' out of a film photography workflow is pernicious.
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"Pernicious" is an odd way to describe a choice. It's just what I and (it seems) many other people have found works for us.

Unless I missed the email, no sane person is telling others that this is the only way to digitise their negatives and/or transparencies.
 
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A year or two back, I had to put on an exhibition that required printing some 30 year old 35mm Kodachrome slides. I tried a slide duplicator which had its own lens on a Sony a7rii, the "photograph the slide with a prime lens" method using the same camera, and an Epson v700. For my purposes with a maximum print size of A3, the v700 won hands down.

Edit to add
I also did tests much earlier to compare the v700 with a Plustek 120 film scanner using 6x7colour negatives. The film scanner managed to extract a little more detail, but nothing that would make a difference at A3.
 
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Another email from Cinestill, this time mentioning Develop & Fix, a company that sells Filmlab software for iPhones (Android and PCs on the way, apparently) for scanning film on a light table. It seems to contain a one-size-fits-all inversion capability. From their video, they appear to suggest clipping a close-up lens onto your iPhone. Not at all convinced, personally!
 
11 Bit depth and file formats

I’m getting a bit far out here, so may be even less correct than usual. But it’s worth at least attempting to cover these topics on a thread about scanning.

First, bit depth. I think this appears in a couple of different ways. In older posts on t’Internet (from some years ago) you may well find discussions about scanner bit depth. This refers to the output of the A/D converter at the heart of the scanner. In modern scanners this appears to be 16 bits, which is enough to encode a density reading of 4.8, so for all practical purposes this is not now an issue… unless you are buying an older scanner. I think you’d need to be sure your older scanner had a bit depth of at least 12 bits to avoid that being a bottleneck in scanning.

When you scan, you can save your image as a JPEG (8-bits per channel), a 24-bit TIFF (sometimes referred to as an 8-bit TIFF… confusing, isn’t it) or a 48-bit TIFF (16 bits per channel). I did a thread a few years ago comparing a file saved as JPEG with the same image saved as a 24-bit TIFF (both actually came from Filmdev rather than my own scanner). The generally accepted advice is that JPEGs deteriorate quite quickly if you save and then re-open the files, so I made 10 minor manipulations of both files, saving and re-opening each time, and compared the difference. My opinion at the end was that for me (NB!!) there was negligible advantage in 24-bit TIFFs as I could see no significant degradation in the JPEGs, while of course the TIFF file size was much larger. I guess the answer here is likely to depend on the extent of the image manipulation you normally do. However, a good point was made in that thread, that BOTH 24-bit TIFFs and JPEGs already suffer from data loss when the scanner software deuces the 12, 14 or 16 bits per channel from the scanner down to 8 bits per channel.

I have not attempted a similar comparison with 48-bit TIFFs. I’d expect the larger files to be ever so slightly better for “normal” scans, but for my purposes the re-doubled file size would not make it worth while. The 48-bit TIFFs don't suffer from the same "data loss at source" issue though. You pays your money (for disk space) and you makes your choice!

Your scanner software might allow you a choice of saving your black and white scans in a greyscale colour space, which only requires 8 or16 bits per pixel. Just a word of warning, however, after doing this for years I started to move towards Capture One Pro for my image processing. This software does not recognise greyscale images, and will generally neither load nor process them. So remember to scan your black and white in a RGB colour space, with 24 or 48 bits per pixel.

Both Vuescan Pro and Silverfast AI Studio will also let you save the raw data from the scanner, for processing later (either re-imported into the same program, or using a post-processing application that recognises them). I presume any given scanner provides the exact same bits to either Vuescan or Silverfast to process (or any other scanner application, come to that). But I don’t know at this point whether the Raw files produced are the same. I’m guessing probably not, they’ll likely be packaged up in different ways. Anyway, Vuescan will let me save the raw data from my 7500i scanner as either a 48-bit TIFF or a 64-bit TIFF. In the latter case, it includes the infra-red channel used to detect dust and scratches. I don’t know if any other application is capable of processing the 4th channel, but I thought it worth a mention.

EDIT: I have recently scanned some Provia 100F slides on my Plustek 7500i with Vuescan Pro, to JPEG and also Vuescan RAW. I imported both to Capture One Pro, which happily recognised the RAW files and allowed me to process them. Results were much better starting with RAW files than with JPEGs, though disk space was 105 MB for the RAW and under 2 MB for the JPEGs. I also discovered that 2400 samples per inch scans were in fact 3600 samples per inch scans, downsampled by Vuescan. /EDIT

As mentioned above, I normally scan my images as JEPGs… but this is NOT advice, just what I do! YMMV. However, if I were making a linear positive scan of a negative for later inversion in an external software package, I think it would definitely be advisable to save as 48-bit TIFFs (or even better Raws). In the process of inversion all the large values become small, and all the small values become large. As in a matrix inversion, IMO you need as many bits as possible, fewer bits are more likely to give poor results. You may remember the warning from ColorPerfect back in Section 10 that the file input had too few bits. This is one of the advantages of making your inversions in the original software package at the time of the scan: the package has access to all the bits available from the scanner!

That was effectively all I wanted to say about file formats; there might be more to say in threads on the individual applications.
 
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Following some frustrations trying to use my Minolta Dimage Elite Scan 5400, I bought a new Nikon ES-1 on Ebay for £34 (+£16 for the BR-5 adapter ring) from Japan. Thus saving nearly £80 on UK RRPs. Honestly, it's a bleeding rip off what some Nikon stuff goes for; simple metal tubes and a metal ring with some threads on it (the BR-5 is an astonishing £48rrp for what is essentially a filter step up/down ring) and rrp is £128 for that lot thank you very much. I'm not impressed. Would like the ES-2 set, but I am not paying £150+ for a set. No way. Come on Nikon sort yourselves out! Stop ripping us off!

Anyway. Playing around with it all, with my D600 and 60mm macro, to copy loads of my old B+W negs. It's a bit of a faff; two tripods and I'm using my SB-700 with an SC-17 TTL cord as the lighting. I don't seem to be quite able to get a full frame copy, as the set up won't focus. Dunno if I'm doing summat wrong or not. I can testify that it doesn't work with the 105mm macro. In case anyone is interested in trying it out with that lens. You'd need to extend the tubes to place the slide further away than the ES-1 allows.

There's then the faff of importing the RAW files into LR, then having to export them to .psd files, so they can be batch converted to greyscale and neg2pos. Sorting out the PS automation took a bit of a go.

Results so far are very positive (no seriously!). A comparison with a full res scan form the Dimage 5400, shows that the ES-1 set up is just a tad sharper, and has a bit more dynamic range. This is encouraging. I think I'm going to struggle more if I want to copy any colour stuff though, as the Dimage is very accurate for colour, and I can't seem to get the WB quite right with the D600. Nothing a bit of tweaking in LR can't solve though, if I'm that bothered.

I'm going to continue, and see how I get on. It's a learning experience anyway.

There might be a Minolta Dimage film scanner up for sale at some point...
 
I had to adapt the ES-1 to take a film strip holder I got with a cheapo 1980s Jessop slide and neg copying tube thingy. I used a sharp knife to peel away the metal foil sticker, which covered two screws. Removed those, and the diffuser and metal spring plate that holds slides in place, comes away. This prevented the accurate and easy positioning of the film strip holder. There is a 6mm plastic spacer at the bottom. I cut a piece of scrap Walnut wood to the thickness of the filmstrip holder (4.7mm), and drilled two corresponding holes for the screws to pass though. Took about 20 mins, most of that carefully planing the wood spacer to the perfect thickness. Works a treat, speeds up operations no end.

Which just shows how poor the ES-1 design actually is. Why didn't Nikon make it compatible with a film strip holder type thing? Like the ES-2? Which, I have to say, is an utter rip off for what it is. Taking the utter p***. Given Nikon's expertise in producing some fantastic specialist photographic equipment, this is one of the rare occasions I've been left less than impressed.

I'd bought the 60mm AF-D macro for this purpose; I figured if it didn't work out, I'd not lose much by selling it on. But what an understated gem of a lens; totally flat field, NO distortion whatsoever, and edge to edge sharpness. I hadn't really used this lens until now, so it's been sitting forlorn and neglected all this time. But it's coming into its own now. Going to crack on and do some more 'scans' today; it'll be a while yet before I've done them all...
 
So; copying with the ES-1 has turned out to be an utter pain in the arse, quite frankly. Involves setting up a cam and flash (that's the easiest bit tbh). Then I had to modify the ES-1 to get my filmstrip holder to fit through it, Even then it's crap, it's either too tight or too loose, as the holder is cheap and nasty. And the ES-1 is crap really, as I've already stated.

Then, I have to turn a RAW file into a PSD so's I can convert it to a positive, then I can import it into LR. Why LR doesn't have a neg2pos function, I really do not know. That's crap. Apparently there's sumat you can do with tone curves. I shall investigate. Would be nice to have a function on import though. I've set batch automations for PS, but it still requires extra work. A scanned neg has had all that done already.



So I've looked into scanning software again, see if I can get my Dimage scanner working again. Downloaded VueScan and Silverfast. The first seems to work ok, confusing interface, not at all like the original Dimage software. Which was s*** tbh, but it looked and felt better. Silverfast; needs a software key, so followed instructions only to be told I'd already asked for this. Then I remember I had, last year. I don't remember the outcome of any tests though. Some issue with the Silverfast server though; so can't get it to work. Praps I'll try to get another key using a different email.

Oh VueScan has quit unexpectedly. That doesn't bode well. I'm not spending money on s*** software; life's too short.


This is turning out to be a right ball ache.
 
Yeah I didn't think it was suitable for my needs. Would be good to find summat that actually works though.
 
I was doing some scanning on my Coolscan V last week using my Win7 laptop.

First time I have fired up either device for a while. I have been using Vuescam for a while since updating from Vista as the drivers hadn’t updated.. when I connected the scanner to the Vaio the Vuescam interface didn’t seem as intuitive as it did before and new drivers were suddenly being installed, meaning I got maximum use of Nikon Scan, I didn’t want to spend more money on software that had a finite life....

Cue lots of successful slide scanning..
 
Yes I think the simple answer is to use an older OS, with the original software.
 
AZ6 said:
Yes I think the simple answer is to use an older OS, with the original software.
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My longer term plan is to buy a new Mac anyway, put the old Mac into service as a server, and hopefully use the remote desktop facility to login to the old Mac under the older OS. That should be possible.

Anyone got any experience with Silverfast?
 
Vuescan is usually pretty stable for me (use it on Windows 7 and macOS), I used to do my inversions in Photoshop using ColorPerfect but I find that the workflow is a lot faster with Lightroom and NegativeLabPro. Vuescan spits out RAW DNGs which work nicely in Lightroom.

I used Silverfast a few years ago but the one scanner, one license thing really irked me since I jump between my Plustek and Epson depending on format.
 
I think @srichards has a dead Minolta scanner, and my Plustek 7500i no longer does multi-scan or multi-exposure properly (the repeat scans are not well registered with the first). Does anyone on here know of anyone who will do a repair or maintenance job on scanners these days?

EDIT: When I came back and tried this later, it seemed to work again!
 
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ChrisR said:
I think @srichards has a dead Minolta scanner, and my Plustek 7500i no longer does multi-scan or multi-exposure properly (the repeat scans are not well registered with the first). Does anyone on here know of anyone who will do a repair or maintenance job on scanners these days?
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Plustek have a technical support Email address and phone number.
I took my Nikon Coolscan to Fixation last year and also had my Epson flatbed fixed by an Epson approved technician somewhere in Suffolk I think, I can check if anyone’s interested.
 
I took the lid off mine and wiggled a cog. It's at least got it out of the loop it was in as vuescan now recognises it. I haven't actually tried an actual scan though.

I might try emailing fixation on the off chance they might have some idea what to do to stop it happening again.
 
This month's Photography Online show has a piece on scanning on an Epson V750, and shows how he worked out the best way to mount the film and find the right height off the glass. He also shows the difference between Silverfast and Epsonscan, so it's worth a few minutes viewing starting from the 30 minute mark.
 
Peter B said:
This month's Photography Online show has a piece on scanning on an Epson V750, and shows how he worked out the best way to mount the film and find the right height off the glass. He also shows the difference between Silverfast and Epsonscan, so it's worth a few minutes viewing starting from the 30 minute mark.
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Thank you I enjoyed all of it.
 
I've enjoyed all of their shows, they are interesting and well produced and the locations are stunning, in fact so stunning that I definitely need to go back to Skye very soon. There's also a fair bit of film related content every week so well worth a watch just for that alone.:)(y)
 
I’ve seen new Epson V600 scanners still being sold, but the spec seems to indicate compatibility to Windows 7 only and not Windows 10. Does anyone know if it would work on a windows 10 system please?
 
Someone who ahs one will be along shortly, I'm sure, but IMHO you can bank on it! Even if the driver didn't work you can be confident that Ed Hamrick would have engineered one into Vuescan, as he did with the driver for the Plustek 7500i when the Mac went all 64-bit...
 
GordonM said:
I’ve seen new Epson V600 scanners still being sold, but the spec seems to indicate compatibility to Windows 7 only and not Windows 10. Does anyone know if it would work on a windows 10 system please?
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I've got the V550 which is, I believe, the same scanner but without the bundled software. Works perfectly in Win10.
 
ChrisR said:
4 Software supporting scanning
Version 1.1​
...

4.4 ColorPerfect

ColorPerfect is software that is dedicated to getting the best from your scanned film images. It works as a plugin to Photoshop, Elements or Photoline [?], but does not work with Affinity Photo, or the DAM packages like Lightroom. I have an old trial version, but so far have not managed to get any decent results from it.

[Youtube videos?]

[At this point we do not have a thread on ColorPerfect. It would be good if someone with a bit more knowledge and experience with the software would create a thread, and if so I’ll link it from here.]

4.5 Negative Lab Pro

We have heard of a plugin to Lightroom (not Photoshop) called Negative Lab Pro (https://www.negativelabpro.com/guide/). It claims to be “a full-featured and powerful tool for editing your colour and black and white negative scans directly in Lightroom”, but at this point we have no direct experience to report.

@Harlequin565 reports he has had great results converting negatives with Negative Lab Pro but it requires Lightroom. Getting colour "right" can be very difficult, especially if you use colour shifted films because the software wants to white balance things "correctly".

4.6 CNMY

This is a plugin or "action" for Photoshop or Affinity Photo, mentioned positively by @Simon Tickle, who uses it with both his DSLR scans and also his Raw images from a Minolta Dimage via Vuescan. See http://eigakai.ro/ps-action/cn-scan-inversion
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There is a thread on 35mmc today about a software plugin for Photoshop called Grain2Pixel that does colour negative inversion. The review makes comparisons with Negative Lab Pro, and also with some scans mdae with a Noritsu scanner. An advantage of G2P is that it costs... drumroll... nothing!

See https://www.35mmc.com/31/07/2020/grain2pixel-review-photoshop-plugin/
 
ChrisR said:
There is a thread on 35mmc today about a software plugin for Photoshop called Grain2Pixel that does colour negative inversion. The review makes comparisons with Negative Lab Pro, and also with some scans mdae with a Noritsu scanner. An advantage of G2P is that it costs... drumroll... nothing!

See https://www.35mmc.com/31/07/2020/grain2pixel-review-photoshop-plugin/
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I've given this a try and, while it seems to work well, it takes forever to process in Photoshop. It could just be my PC and only having 8gb RAM, but it takes over 15 minutes to convert a single negative. Maybe I've used the wrong Vuescan settings to output the linear tiff file - they're over 300mb!

I'll be interested to see how others fare with it.
 
8Gb of RAM coupled with 300Mb files is not a good recipe IMO. My 6x7s at 5000x4000px are about 70Mb (tifs). 300Mb is big!
 
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