Negative Scanning with ChromeOS

Film does funny things in boxes, away from watchful eyes.

Archibald wrote in post #19067951
Good stuff.

I have a really old neg from B/W 620 film that is badly warped in the middle. It somehow got crinkled, it's quite nasty. I tried to restore its flatness (reasoning that everything that warps can be unwarped), and put it between glass, slightly tensioned, for a couple of weeks. Made no difference! How the heck did it get warped in the first place then? Water doesn't help. I am too scared to try heat on it.

I had something similar dated from the 1930’s. I took it to a UPS Store and they scanned it on one of theirbest scanners. Turned out quite nice up to an 8 x 10 which was presented to the children of the couple. The UPS Store did weight don’t the cover of the scanner with a ream of paper.

This does work great! newer cameras have higher resolution than the negative scanners....

you can go one to one with an extension tube.

Mike

Aronis wrote in post #19067969
This does work great! newer cameras have higher resolution than the negative scanners....

you can go one to one with an extension tube.

Mike

Sure, but resolution isn't really that important. Older negs have poor resolution compared to what we are used to today. I can resolve the grain of old 35mm negs at 2800 dpi. From that point of view, many scanners and cameras would be fine for most negs. You also need to take DR into account. How deeply into the tones will the scanner or camera go? I find cameras and scanners both do a good job but often give different results.

One advantage of cameras is that shooting a neg is so easy. There are no complicated settings. With a scanner, you have to set white and black points, brightness, contrast (or curve) settings and a bunch of other things or accept default, and often those turn out not to be ideal. Most folks (including me) fiddle until it looks right or just guess at those settings. There is also dimensional integrity. Try scanning an original in a scanner and then turning it 90 degrees and compare. The aspect ratio will often change slightly.

Flatbed scanners with a transparency mode can scan at the right resolution but give crappy results on 35mm negs. I don't know why, but it is not because of resolution.

Archibald wrote in post #19068001
Sure, but resolution isn't really that important. Older negs have poor resolution compared to what we are used to today. I can resolve the grain of old 35mm negs at 2800 dpi. From that point of view, many scanners and cameras would be fine for most negs. You also need to take DR into account. How deeply into the tones will the scanner or camera go? I find cameras and scanners both do a good job but often give different results.

One advantage of cameras is that shooting a neg is so easy. There are no complicated settings. With a scanner, you have to set white and black points, brightness, contrast (or curve) settings and a bunch of other things or accept default, and often those turn out not to be ideal. Most folks (including me) fiddle until it looks right or just guess at those settings. There is also dimensional integrity. Try scanning an original in a scanner and then turning it 90 degrees and compare. The aspect ratio will often change slightly.

Flatbed scanners with a transparency mode can scan at the right resolution but give crappy results on 35mm negs. I don't know why, but it is not because of resolution.

My experience has been very different. A scan from a SLR is noticeably better than a scanner. See my samples in post #4. I suppose I can get the v700 and wet scan, but I suspect that the SLR will still be better, at least it was when I experimented with it on my v500. Plus, wet scanning is a real PITA.

gjl711 wrote in post #19068006
My experience has been very different. A scan from a SLR is noticeably better than a scanner. See my samples in post #4. I suppose I can get the v700 and wet scan, but I suspect that the SLR will still be better, at least it was when I experimented with it on my v500. Plus, wet scanning is a real PITA.

Lol, I would not do wet scanning. My results on my V700 have not been that good. My reference point for 35mm scanning is the Nikon Coolscan 5000. (I own both.)

I have a Canon FS4000US Film Scanner and use a 27 inch Mac. When I first got the scanner in about 1999 I had a Windows machine and was using the Canon Scanner software, meh, and trying to get colors correct was a FRIGGEN NIGHTMARE. When I tried on the Mac for the first time a few years ago I was amazed that the colors were great right out of the scanner.

I now use the program Vuescan (2011 version) which works great. Color is pretty good right from the scanner even with 30 year old negatives. Some of my 40 year old negatives have a color shift but can compensate. Vuescan lets you pick which negative frame you want to scan so you can batch scan a strip and pick the ones you want. It has built in full compatibility with the Canon scanner and can use the scanners scratch removing process, etc. I scan at 2000 DPI and set infrared cleaning to medium with color restoration and light grain reduction. I output to a 24 bit RGB Tiff file. I did not find the need to run at 4000 DPI.

I have been itching to make an adapter to scan 110 negatives and those I will scan at 4000 DPI. That is my next macro project with extension tubes to try to use my 1Dx to copy those negatives.

A couple years ago I shot quick photos of my 35 mm negative sheets with my 1Dx with the hopes of being able to more easily look at the negatives to pick images. I shot about 180 or so sheets and did it poorly, quite frankly. I should have used a tripod......anyway I was using a lightbox. When I first looked at the negatives I was having an issue converting to positives. This was a few years ago before i got Lightroom and Photoshop and learned how to do it. By inverting the color curves you can 'process' the negatives. Now I can look at 'contact' sheets to pick photos I want to actually scan. I wish I took the time to more properly shoot those images since i did not crop them with the camera and wasted megapixels. Some were not flat since I was hand holding. Someday I will re do it. It was very helpful to find images I wanted but fuzzy to look at.

I am in the process of making a photobook for my 25th anniversary for my wife. I scanned a bunch on 35 mm negatives and shot copies of our wedding album (used tripod this time LOL) since they would not fit in my flatbed scanner. Those images that were from the digital age are much easier to work with.

Mike

example of a single strip from a whole roll, nothing personal in the photos, LOL. This is from Lightroom OnLine Version so it was just cropped from preview quality image. I was too lazy to run upstairs to my other machine to post this. The actual scans are a bit better and are useable.