Camera "scanning" with a fluorescent light box.

Tom Kershaw · Apr 16, 2020

I've been slowly working towards a set-up for photographing negatives with a camera for quick proofing / web uploads etc. i.e not fine reproduction quality levels. Generally I have the idea to purchase one of the Kaiser Slimlite units, however as a proof of concept, earlier today I placed my older but good quality light box under the camera and did some experiments. Somewhat to my surprise it worked better than expected. Colour seems to be okay for basic purposes. Black & white large format negatives are fine. I've uploaded an example.

Not sure what to make of this as I'd expected the results to be fairly unusable.

Les Sarile · Apr 16, 2020

Tom Kershaw said:
Not sure what to make of this as I'd expected the results to be fairly unusable.

Is this work for yourself or others? If it's for yourself - and your happy with the results then consider it job well done!

Tom Kershaw · Apr 17, 2020

Les Sarile said:
Is this work for yourself or others? If it's for yourself - and your happy with the results then consider it job well done!

For myself. I'm still looking at the LED unit but thought this information would be pertinent to some of the discussion on the forum.

The camera and lens combination I used was a Fuji X-T2 with the 60mm macro lens. I did however discover the lens is too long for single frame reproduction of a 8"x10" negative on my adapted Meopta Magnifax enlarger, so I switched to a 23mm lens; suspect the Fuji 35mm is probably a good bet for this purpose. May be worth noting that people using full-frame digital cameras seem to gravitate towards relatively short length macro lenses. I think 'NortheastPhotographic' on here is using a 70mm on his Panasonic S1R.

mohmad khatab · Apr 17, 2020

Tom Kershaw said:
I've been slowly working towards a set-up for photographing negatives with a camera for quick proofing / web uploads etc. i.e not fine reproduction quality levels. Generally I have the idea to purchase one of the Kaiser Slimlite units, however as a proof of concept, earlier today I placed my older but good quality light box under the camera and did some experiments. Somewhat to my surprise it worked better than expected. Colour seems to be okay for basic purposes. Black & white large format negatives are fine. I've uploaded an example.

Not sure what to make of this as I'd expected the results to be fairly unusable.View attachment 244100

Congratulations on those great results.
I think there are some opinions that the light of tungsten may be better than fluorescent light.

ChristopherCoy · Apr 17, 2020

What's your setup look like?

locutus · Apr 17, 2020

Tom Kershaw said:
May be worth noting that people using full-frame digital cameras seem to gravitate towards relatively short length macro lenses. I think 'NortheastPhotographic' on here is using a 70mm on his Panasonic S1R.

I use a 100mm on a S1, camera mounted on a enlarger column

jtk · Apr 17, 2020

Tom Kershaw said:
I've been slowly working towards a set-up for photographing negatives with a camera for quick proofing / web uploads etc. i.e not fine reproduction quality levels. Generally I have the idea to purchase one of the Kaiser Slimlite units, however as a proof of concept, earlier today I placed my older but good quality light box under the camera and did some experiments. Somewhat to my surprise it worked better than expected. Colour seems to be okay for basic purposes. Black & white large format negatives are fine. I've uploaded an example.

Not sure what to make of this as I'd expected the results to be fairly unusable.View attachment 244100

Please describe or name your old lightbox. What sort of light source?

Lachlan Young · Apr 17, 2020

Tom Kershaw said:
however as a proof of concept, earlier today I placed my older but good quality light box under the camera and did some experiments. Somewhat to my surprise it worked better than expected.

It's probably no worse as a light source than that in most of the high end CCD scanners. As long as it is correctly characterised/ white balanced/ profiled you should be ok.

Tom Kershaw · Apr 17, 2020

locutus said:
I use a 100mm on a S1, camera mounted on a enlarger column

Which lens is that? The Fuji 60mm is about equivalent to a 90mm on a full-frame camera.

Les Sarile · Apr 17, 2020

Tom Kershaw said:
For myself. I'm still looking at the LED unit but thought this information would be pertinent to some of the discussion on the forum.

What was your workflow to process the shot - color negative conversion, and how long did it take to get to this point?
Have you compared the color/contrast to that of a scanner?

Tom Kershaw · Apr 17, 2020

Les Sarile said:
What was your workflow to process the shot - color negative conversion, and how long did it take to get to this point?
Have you compared the color/contrast to that of a scanner?

I spent several hours yesterday investigating the process but the actual time between clicking the shutter and producing the jpeg was a few minutes. Yes, I've compared the detail to my scanner, a Nikon Coolscan 9000 - the scanner delivers much higher resolution and detail reproduction unsurprisingly but the colour from the camera "scanned" set-up is surprisingly good.

Workflow (camera): raw files from X-T2 converted in MakeTiff then opened in PhotoLine, converting to posititve with the ColorNeg (ColorPerfect) software - the same as I use for colour negative scanning.

For those asking about the lightbox it is a fairly large fluorescent unit from Firstcall Photographic here in the UK, I don't think they list them anymore.

Tom Kershaw · Apr 17, 2020

Here is an example from my camera set-up with a 5"x4" negative. FP4 Plus & XTOL.

Les Sarile · Apr 17, 2020

Tom Kershaw said:
I spent several hours yesterday investigating the process but the actual time between clicking the shutter and producing the jpeg was a few minutes. Yes, I've compared the detail to my scanner, a Nikon Coolscan 9000 - the scanner delivers much higher resolution and detail reproduction unsurprisingly but the colour from the camera "scanned" set-up is surprisingly good.

Do you use Nikonscan or Vuescan with the 9000?
I would be interested to see the color/contrast between the 9000 and this.

BTW, having the Coolscans is what stymies the furtherance of my developing a camera "scanner" workflow . . .

Tom Kershaw · Apr 17, 2020

Les Sarile said:
Do you use Nikonscan or Vuescan with the 9000?
I would be interested to see the color/contrast between the 9000 and this.

VueScan with the 9000 although I can scan with the Nikon Scan 4 software on an old Power Book G4. The 'off the scanner' file does look different - colour-wise. - I made a slight correction as the tiff had a slight blue / green bias.

locutus · Apr 17, 2020

Tom Kershaw said:
Which lens is that? The Fuji 60mm is about equivalent to a 90mm on a full-frame camera.

Leica 100mm apo elmar it. But I think any 100 or 105 macro would do.

As light source I use the intrepid enlarger lightsource and 5x4 mask. Processing I do in capture one which allows inversions easy. Captures are done in multishot mode.

I think with this setup one can get a significant amount of the real information in a 5x4 negative.

Tom Kershaw · Apr 17, 2020

locutus said:
As light source I use the intrepid enlarger lightsource and 5x4 mask. Processing I do in capture one which allows inversions easy. Captures are done in multishot mode.

Is the intrepid lightsource LED? The Fuji X-T2 doesn't have multishot mode - the Panasonic cameras do seem to be a good option for this application.

Les Sarile · Apr 17, 2020

Tom Kershaw said:
VueScan with the 9000 although I can scan with the Nikon Scan 4 software on an old Power Book G4. The 'off the scanner' file does look different - colour-wise. - I made a slight correction as the tiff had a slight blue / green bias.

Wow, that is a dramatic difference.
To your eyes, which is more true to the actual? Which do you prefer?

locutus · Apr 18, 2020

Tom Kershaw said:
Is the intrepid lightsource LED? The Fuji X-T2 doesn't have multishot mode - the Panasonic cameras do seem to be a good option for this application.

Yes, this one: https://intrepidcamera.co.uk/products/intrepid-enlarger-kit

And as a stand i use the column from a Durst M301, it has a standard screw thread to mount the camera. I made a small plastic washer to push the camera away from the column to keep it straight.

I'll dig through my scans to see if there's something i want to share.

alanrockwood · Apr 18, 2020

One thing to watch out for is that some flourescent lights have quite a bit of flicker at 120 Hz (twice the line frequency) in the US or 100 Hz in most of the rest of the world. This can cause artifacts in a scan-by-camera system. Using an extra slow shutter speed can reduce this effect by averaging over several cycles. I think there are some flourescent lights that are low-flicker. Obviously, I don't know if this applies to your light box.

Incandescent lights also have some flicker, in this case it would be at line frequency instead of twice line frequency. However, I believe the flicker from incandescent lamps is less than the flicker from most fluorescent lamps.

alanrockwood · Apr 18, 2020

alanrockwood said:
One thing to watch out for is that some flourescent lights have quite a bit of flicker at 120 Hz (twice the line frequency) in the US or 100 Hz in most of the rest of the world. This can cause artifacts in a scan-by-camera system. Using an extra slow shutter speed can reduce this effect by averaging over several cycles. I think there are some flourescent lights that are low-flicker. Obviously, I don't know if this applies to your light box.

Incandescent lights also have some flicker, in this case it would be at line frequency instead of twice line frequency. However, I believe the flicker from incandescent lamps is less than the flicker from most fluorescent lamps.

Also, I believe that if your shutter duration is accurate and is set at some integer multiple of line period then the flicker issues disappear. For example, in the US, if your shutter speed is exactly 1/60 then each spot on the sensor will be exposed to exactly two flicker cycles and the artifacts disappear. If you set your shutter speed at 1/30 then each spot on the sensor will be exposed to exactly four cycles.

However, if your shutter speed is 1/50 in the US then you can expect to see artifacts because 1/50 it is not an integer multiple of 1/120 of a second. In areas of the world that run at 50 Hz your shutter speed should be an integer multiple of 1/50. This could include 1/50, 1/25, etc.

Note: I haven't worked out if 1/120 shutter speed would work in the US (or 1/100 in other countries), but it might work. It would take some thought to work this out for sure.

The above discussion about shutter speed matching assumes fluorescent lights, not incandescent lights.

alanrockwood · Apr 18, 2020

You can do some simple experiments to demonstrate this effect. Find a place that is lit by old fashioned fluorescent lamps. Take the lens off your camera, so the sensor is evenly illuminated. (You don't want a recognizable image for this test.) Shoot in Manual mode. Adjust the iso so it is in a reasonable range, i.e. so the histogram is centered somewhere near the middle of the range for the shutter speed you are using. Shoot several quick shots at a "good" shutter speed, based on criteria mentioned above (e.g. 1/30 if you are in the US.) Look at the image playback and look at the histogram. Successive shots should all look the same, or very nearly the same. Now set the shutter and a high speed with a "bad" setting, such as 1/200 in the US, and shoot a bunch of shots in quick succession. You should see differences between frames. The histograms should bounce around a lot, and successive frames should look quite different, often with color and/or intensity banding in the frame. This demonstrates the kind of artifacts you can see with a mismatched shutter speed.

Tom Kershaw · Apr 18, 2020

Les Sarile said:
Wow, that is a dramatic difference.
To your eyes, which is more true to the actual? Which do you prefer?

I would need to make some more comparisons to assess the colour. The Nikon is giving a much 'cleaner' result. The negative here is 10 years old so I can't reliably recall the exact lighting conditions of the day.

Tom Kershaw · Apr 18, 2020

alanrockwood said:
Also, I believe that if your shutter duration is accurate and is set at some integer multiple of line period then the flicker issues disappear. For example, in the US, if your shutter speed is exactly 1/60 then each spot on the sensor will be exposed to exactly two flicker cycles and the artifacts disappear. If you set your shutter speed at 1/30 then each spot on the sensor will be exposed to exactly four cycles.

This is one of the main reasons I was concerned about using the lightbox for a scan-by-camera process, in addition to eveness of illumination - but this latter issue seems to reduce if the film is sitting above the lightbox - perhaps still worth further investigation.

bernard_L · Apr 18, 2020

As said above by Les Sarile, if you're happy with the results, fine. But I'd be cautious about using a random fluorescent source for color scanning, as the output contains a number of spectral lines. Worst case is one line halfway between the peaks of two dyes --> maximum cross-talk. Presumably when Epson (for example) uses a fluorescent source in a scanner, they are careful about phosphor selection to avoid that. Better is incandescent (true continuous spectrum); even better RVB LEDs (Nikon) centered on the dyes peak wavelengths. Possibly anecdotal, but I was once struck by the higher saturation of same C-41 frame scanned with LS-2000 versus V-700; not self-delusion because only after did I realize the difference in light sources.

Tom Kershaw · Apr 18, 2020

bernard_L said:
As said above by Les Sarile, if you're happy with the results, fine. But I'd be cautious about using a random fluorescent source for color scanning, as the output contains a number of spectral lines. Worst case is one line halfway between the peaks of two dyes --> maximum cross-talk. Presumably when Epson (for example) uses a fluorescent source in a scanner, they are careful about phosphor selection to avoid that. Better is incandescent (true continuous spectrum); even better RVB LEDs (Nikon) centered on the dyes peak wavelengths. Possibly anecdotal, but I was once struck by the higher saturation of same C-41 frame scanned with LS-2000 versus V-700; not self-delusion because only after did I realize the difference in light sources.

The aspect of spectral responce concerns me as well. It is interesting that many now seem to be using the Kaiser Slimlite LED lightboxes for 'camera-as-scanner' approaches. This set-up I've been experimenting with seems acceptable for web presentation of large format black & white negatives, but I'm not sure of what else at this point. An incandescent continuous spectrum lightbox could be a worthwhile experiment.

Camera "scanning" with a fluorescent light box.

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