Digital Contact Sheets

moltogordo · Apr 11, 2015

Here's something I just discovered (I'm sure it's been done before but not by me, and I've never heard it mentioned before).

You can take your negative sleeves, tape them on a light box, photograph them with your DSLR, reverse them in your photo program, and voila!!! A contact sheet. You can also correct individual neg densities with your outline, levels and curves adjustments beforehand, so you don't have to struggle with different densities deciding which neg to print. 35mm contact sheets are notorious for this. I'll never waste valuable paper and chemicals on a darkroom contact sheet again!

This one I posted here is 1000 dpi so is a bit fuzzy, but a full file is as easy to get info off, and on a large computer screen is more than satisfactory to use to decide which negatives to print.

I am pretty sure many know of this technique, but I didn't until I thought of it, so I hope this makes just ONE member happy!

Mainecoonmaniac · Apr 11, 2015

Nice! Here's something quick and dirty.

http://petapixel.com/2012/10/23/how-to-use-your-iphone-as-a-quick-and-easy-negative-viewer/

snapguy · Apr 11, 2015

huh

Eggzackly whut are an "iPhone"? Izzat like a rural phone with a party line?

BainDarret · Apr 11, 2015

I've never been happy with contact sheets of roll film plus I prefer not to use up expensive paper for proof sheets. I recently tried proofing by laying out the negs on a scanner (Epson V700) in the 8x10 film guide area and I was pleasantly surprised with the result which is attached. I lay the negatives emulsion side down and flop them in the photo editor. I find it much easier to evaluate a photo this way. If the strips of film will not lie flat I simply put a thin sheet of glass on them.

nworth · Apr 11, 2015

You usually just use contact sheets to find promising negatives, so a little lack of definition is not usually a disaster. Although I print my B&W negatives optically, I've taken to scanning them so I can index them in Lightroom. As part of the workflow, I make a digital contact sheets using Adobe Bridge. (Lightroom has some sort of mechanism for doing this too, but I haven't learned to use it.)

moltogordo · Apr 11, 2015

I'm kinda in league with snapguy. i-phone? Thought we wuz Luddites! Don't have one, won't get one. Gotta be left alone sometime!!

Never had luck with my scanner - that's what led me to the current solution. But photographers seem to be a very ingenious bunch and find solutions whether they have to beg, buy, borrow, steal or manufacture.

GRHazelton · Apr 11, 2015

I shoot film AND digital. Please, no boos! I scan my negatives with an Epson V 700 into Lightroom where I have a "contact sheet" visible on my monitor. Lightroom allows assigning subject headings very easily so that I have a catalog of my film shots, as well as digital. The negatives are assigned numbers by Lightroom, and the date of the scan. I file the negatives in the usual manner, labeling each sheet of filed negatives with the date and noting the inclusive "frame" numbers assigned by Lightroom. Note that I control the beginning number of the scan sequence. Gotta keep up with that!

So far this is working well. I'm working through decades of film shooting. If you go this route or something similar, for goodness' sake establish a GOOD backup routine, or you could lose days of work in one horrendous moment.... Trust me, I know!

BetterSense · Apr 12, 2015

I am going to get around to doing this with my D70. However, I am not sure how to view the results. I think for 35mm you would want to be able to zoom into the image and move it around effortlessly to not be cumbersome. Since I am not a digital kind of guy I don't know what viewer program to use for this.

I also debated lining up the negative sheets fairly precisely with some kind of guides on the light-box. Then I could wwrite an imagemagick script to crop out the images. I do that sort of thing when "scanning" 5x7 prints.

moltogordo · Apr 12, 2015

If you notice, my "contact sheets" are jpegs. I just open it up in my viewer (I use Linux) and move it around with the cursor, and enlarge or diminish it with the mouse. Easy.

moltogordo · Apr 12, 2015

GRHazelton said:
I shoot film AND digital. Please, no boos!

None from here - I shoot quite a lot of digital, but my B&W is film only. As about 50% of my shooting is B&W, that's not so bad. I'd shoot transparency if Cibachrome was still available, and I do shoot some C41.

Feel that it's just another medium, like oil paints vs. acrylics vs. watercolor.

Digital Contact Sheets

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