New toy arrived today - Lomo LC-A 120.

[Ces1um]

That's Fuji 400H - what film are you shooting?

I've put ektar, portra, lomography's film, and Fuji 400 through it. They all come out muted- I thought it was my camera because when I use my lubitel I don't get issues like I do from my lca-120. I had pretty much resorted to using it for black and white only, which it seems to thrive at. I've emailed lomography even about it. That being said, I just scanned 3 rolls last night and I increased my gamma on the scanner and got a slightly more acceptable result- but not what you've managed above.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

I've put ektar, portra, lomography's film, and Fuji 400 through it. They all come out muted- I thought it was my camera because when I use my lubitel I don't get issues like I do from my lca-120. I had pretty much resorted to using it for black and white only, which it seems to thrive at. I've emailed lomography even about it. That being said, I just scanned 3 rolls last night and I increased my gamma on the scanner and got a slightly more acceptable result- but not what you've managed above.

What scanner and what scanning software are you using? Quite possibly you're using a generic film profile instead of a specific film profile for the given film you're scanning. Either that, or your LCA has a dud lens.

 

[Ces1um]

What scanner and what scanning software are you using? Quite possibly you're using a generic film profile instead of a specific film profile for the given film you're scanning. Either that, or your LCA has a dud lens.

I have the Epson perfection v600 and I'm using Epson's software for scanning. For color I usually set the gamma to 2.2 with autoexposure set to continuous. I don't enable any other settings but I do notice that the default for sharpening always seems to revert to "medium" and must be a scanner preset. Everything else is left untouched/unmodified. I don't seem to get these issues when I scan film from my lubitel though, so I do seem to think it's a dud. It seems to just like black and white film.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

I have the Epson perfection v600 and I'm using Epson's software for scanning. For color I usually set the gamma to 2.2 with autoexposure set to continuous. I don't enable any other settings but I do notice that the default for sharpening always seems to revert to "medium" and must be a scanner preset. Everything else is left untouched/unmodified. I don't seem to get these issues when I scan film from my lubitel though, so I do seem to think it's a dud. It seems to just like black and white film.

I'm using a V750 and running SilverFast for my scanning software. I never liked the results I got out of the Epson software. SilverFast is not the most intuitive software in the world, but it gives you a LOT more control than the Epson program does. For one thing, it has a very wide range of film profiles, and using those really does make a significant difference in how the scans turn out.

 

[Ces1um]

I'm using a V750 and running SilverFast for my scanning software. I never liked the results I got out of the Epson software. SilverFast is not the most intuitive software in the world, but it gives you a LOT more control than the Epson program does. For one thing, it has a very wide range of film profiles, and using those really does make a significant difference in how the scans turn out.

I'll have to pick that software up. I've heard of a few people now who swear by it.

 

[RattyMouse]

For one thing, it has a very wide range of film profiles, and using those really does make a significant difference in how the scans turn out.

Is this true just for color film or does it also apply to monochrome?

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

Is this true just for color film or does it also apply to monochrome?

It's for both color and monochrome. SilverFast has discreet profiles for FP4+, HP5+, Tri-X, Tmax 100, Tmax 400, Fuji Neopan, just to name a few. And I've tried it - if I scan FP4+ with the Tri-X profile, for example, the contrast and overall tonality are noticeably different.

 

[RattyMouse]

It's for both color and monochrome. SilverFast has discreet profiles for FP4+, HP5+, Tri-X, Tmax 100, Tmax 400, Fuji Neopan, just to name a few. And I've tried it - if I scan FP4+ with the Tri-X profile, for example, the contrast and overall tonality are noticeably different.

I'm not sure I've ever seen any film profiles for non color films when I use SilverFast (Ai Studio). I'll have to look again more closely.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

I'm not sure I've ever seen any film profiles for non color films when I use SilverFast (Ai Studio). I'll have to look again more closely.

Depending on which version of SilverFast you're using, they may or may not be obvious. They're not listed as a separate category, just blended in with the others.I can screen-shot it when I get home to show you.

 

[xya]

here they are again, those discussions about silverfast. I understand the interest in this software to get the most out of your films, but please admit, it's a pita. it has always been and still is. I have an old professional scanner, a minolta, which delivered good results. to get more out of it, I bought an early version of silverfast. to be honest, yes, there were better results possible, but how complicated to use! and then I found out about professional scan services. they are expensive, but how many of your photos do you really need in professional quality?

more than a year ago I bought a CanoScan 9000F Mark II, just to have a quick overview of the films I shoot (quite some). The CanoScan software is basic, I know, but within 10 minutes a film is scanned and you can see some results. again I bought a silverfast version (8) for this scanner, as the reviews were good. well, to be honest, I just scanned 3 films and it cost me hours. in my eyes this software ist still too complicated. so I am back to where I was 10 years ago: a basic scanner and good film holders to see an overview and store this in case of and a professional scan service if I want more.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

here they are again, those discussions about silverfast. I understand the interest in this software to get the most out of your films, but please admit, it's a pita. it has always been and still is. I have an old professional scanner, a minolta, which delivered good results. to get more out of it, I bought an early version of silverfast. to be honest, yes, there were better results possible, but how complicated to use! and then I found out about professional scan services. they are expensive, but how many of your photos do you really need in professional quality?

more than a year ago I bought a CanoScan 9000F Mark II, just to have a quick overview of the films I shoot (quite some). The CanoScan software is basic, I know, but within 10 minutes a film is scanned and you can see some results. again I bought a silverfast version (8) for this scanner, as the reviews were good. well, to be honest, I just scanned 3 films and it cost me hours. in my eyes this software ist still too complicated. so I am back to where I was 10 years ago: a basic scanner and good film holders to see an overview and store this in case of and a professional scan service if I want more.

Well, for me, SilverFast helps me get a lot more out of my existing scanner, and brings the cost of lab-quality scans back down to earth. To do better than I am doing, I'd have to be sending my film out somewhere that would charge me $50+ per scan. At that price, it doesn't take much scanning to pay for the SilverFast license and the Epson V750 (about 200-250 scans - and I've done WAY more than that). I can get quick scans from SilverFast to proof images in minutes, and decide what I want to scan at higher resolution/better quality. I realize the interface is not intuitive, but I feel like I learned my way around it with reasonable alacrity.

 

[Ces1um]

here they are again, those discussions about silverfast. I understand the interest in this software to get the most out of your films, but please admit, it's a pita. it has always been and still is. I have an old professional scanner, a minolta, which delivered good results. to get more out of it, I bought an early version of silverfast. to be honest, yes, there were better results possible, but how complicated to use! and then I found out about professional scan services. they are expensive, but how many of your photos do you really need in professional quality?

more than a year ago I bought a CanoScan 9000F Mark II, just to have a quick overview of the films I shoot (quite some). The CanoScan software is basic, I know, but within 10 minutes a film is scanned and you can see some results. again I bought a silverfast version (8) for this scanner, as the reviews were good. well, to be honest, I just scanned 3 films and it cost me hours. in my eyes this software ist still too complicated. so I am back to where I was 10 years ago: a basic scanner and good film holders to see an overview and store this in case of and a professional scan service if I want more.

I've never used this software before, but just looking at a youtube tutorial it looks fairly straight forward. Definitely more work than the epson software as you mentioned but it doesn't look too bad. If you still have the software and want to give it another go, here's a link to the video...



I just downloaded the demo, should be interesting to see how difficult it is to use. I'm not a lover of poorly written software but considering the bugs in the epson software it might be worth it for me. Wait and see I guess.

 

[Huss]

and yes, that's the shadow of the strap from the camera dangling down into the frame.

I like this a lot and it shows that your camera's focus works (mine had to be a one - off)

 

[xya]

... I'd have to be sending my film out somewhere that would charge me $50+ per scan. At that price, it doesn't take much scanning to pay for the SilverFast license and the Epson V750 (about 200-250 scans - and I've done WAY more than that)...

you are right, at that price, I would try it myself. but I live in france and germany. in germany, the price of a 6300 dpi professional drum scan of 24x35 or 3200 dpi medium format is 5 euro, less than 6$, with a minimum of 5 scans. in france, I live in calais, it's even less. there are 2 shops, one does 24x36 and the other does medium format, that have professional scanners for their lab. they charge even less if they do the developping. that's quite a difference. maybe you could understand my point of view...

 

[RattyMouse]

It's for both color and monochrome. SilverFast has discreet profiles for FP4+, HP5+, Tri-X, Tmax 100, Tmax 400, Fuji Neopan, just to name a few. And I've tried it - if I scan FP4+ with the Tri-X profile, for example, the contrast and overall tonality are noticeably different.

My version of SilverFast Ai Studio (8.0) has no monochrome film profiles at all. Many many color ones, but no monochrome.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

My version of SilverFast Ai Studio (8.0) has no monochrome film profiles at all. Many many color ones, but no monochrome.

hmmm.... They're not in a separate section, but blended in.

 

[RattyMouse]

hmmm.... They're not in a separate section, but blended in.

Interesting. I looked in the Kodak section of SilverFast and see the same as what you posted above. I rarely ever shoot Kodak film since I started my own scanning and so neglected to ever look there. On the Fuji side, I see no black and white films at all. They are all 100% color emulsions. Strange.

 

[RattyMouse]

hmmm.... They're not in a separate section, but blended in.

I tried using the Kodak Tri-X setting in SilverFast. It made the image extremely dark, like 2.5 stops under exposed. I'm not sure what the point of such a setting is. How can this be useful so dark?

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

I tried using the Kodak Tri-X setting in SilverFast. It made the image extremely dark, like 2.5 stops under exposed. I'm not sure what the point of such a setting is. How can this be useful so dark?

I don't have that particular issue when using the Tri-X setting for scanning Tri-X, but the profiles have been known occasionally to be off-the-mark. Not usually, but rarely. If you want something analogous to a profile for Fuji, try using Tmax 100 or Ilford Delta 100. As a worst-case scenario, try FP4+ - it's a good all-purpose film with a fairly generic curve to it, so it should get you in the ballpark for Neopan. Also, have you kept your SilverFast up to date? They tend to issue updates with reasonable frequency (3-4x / year). I'll look when I'm home to see if I have any fuji b/w profiles on my version.

 

[RattyMouse]

I don't have that particular issue when using the Tri-X setting for scanning Tri-X, but the profiles have been known occasionally to be off-the-mark. Not usually, but rarely. If you want something analogous to a profile for Fuji, try using Tmax 100 or Ilford Delta 100. As a worst-case scenario, try FP4+ - it's a good all-purpose film with a fairly generic curve to it, so it should get you in the ballpark for Neopan. Also, have you kept your SilverFast up to date? They tend to issue updates with reasonable frequency (3-4x / year). I'll look when I'm home to see if I have any fuji b/w profiles on my version.

What exactly are these profiles doing to the scan? That is what confuses me. The film itself exhibits the characteristics of any particular film so I dont know what help software can do in this area. For example, if I scan Portra film, it clearly has the look of Portra. When I scan 400H, it looks exactly like I would expect it to. I dont need to have software add in something to help make Portra look like Portra. Does this make sense?

Because of this thought process, I have never been all that concerned with SilverFast's Negafix feature.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

What exactly are these profiles doing to the scan? That is what confuses me. The film itself exhibits the characteristics of any particular film so I dont know what help software can do in this area. For example, if I scan Portra film, it clearly has the look of Portra. When I scan 400H, it looks exactly like I would expect it to. I dont need to have software add in something to help make Portra look like Portra. Does this make sense?

Because of this thought process, I have never been all that concerned with SilverFast's Negafix feature.

It probably makes more sense with color than it does with b/w when explaining, but I think the general principle is transferrable. Every film has its own characteristic contrast curve - Portra is less contrasty than Ektar, for example. Also, if you compare the film base color on Fuji with Kodak, they are different colors and different densities. These curves tell the software how to adjust the input from the scanner to compensate for those idiosyncrasies of film base, dye sets, and characteristic curves. This was how minilabs used to do it, in their own way, back in the day. With 35mm, some of the machines, anyway, could read the bar code embedded in the edge markings on the film to know which film had been loaded, and then adjust the filter pack used when exposing the film to make prints. With 120 where you didn't have that bar code, you could manually enter the film type in the machine, or pass it a generic type.

 

[RattyMouse]

It probably makes more sense with color than it does with b/w when explaining, but I think the general principle is transferrable. Every film has its own characteristic contrast curve - Portra is less contrasty than Ektar, for example. Also, if you compare the film base color on Fuji with Kodak, they are different colors and different densities. These curves tell the software how to adjust the input from the scanner to compensate for those idiosyncrasies of film base, dye sets, and characteristic curves. This was how minilabs used to do it, in their own way, back in the day. With 35mm, some of the machines, anyway, could read the bar code embedded in the edge markings on the film to know which film had been loaded, and then adjust the filter pack used when exposing the film to make prints. With 120 where you didn't have that bar code, you could manually enter the film type in the machine, or pass it a generic type.

Thanks for your reply. I understand and agree that each film has its own contrast curve. Portra and Ektar are good examples. Yet if you scan these without use of any software input to these curves, to my eye, they look exactly as they should. Portra will look like Portra, and Ektar will look like Ektar. They will be very different from each other. Because of this the need for these software inputs seems unnecessary. Perhaps without the fixes the scanner gets 95% of the look of the film and the software fix provides that last 5%? Is that the way to look at this?

 

[Oren Grad]

What exactly are these profiles doing to the scan? That is what confuses me. The film itself exhibits the characteristics of any particular film so I dont know what help software can do in this area. For example, if I scan Portra film, it clearly has the look of Portra. When I scan 400H, it looks exactly like I would expect it to. I dont need to have software add in something to help make Portra look like Portra. Does this make sense?

No. What you're missing is that nobody uses the negative as the final product, and when you go from the negative to a print, on-screen electronic image, or some other form of output, you are *always* transforming the original in some way. Most importantly, you are manipulating the tonal scale (and, in the case of color film, the color balance). For example, the tonal scale of Tri-X in a darkroom print depends heavily not just on the characteristic curve of the Tri-X film developed in whatever developer you use, but also on the characteristic curve of the paper you print on. You can make radically different-looking prints from a Tri-X negative simply by choice of paper.

What the SilverFast profiles do is make some assumptions about what the characteristic curve of the negative looks like for a given brand of film, plus some other assumptions about what the tonal scale of the scan should be, and it applies a transformation to the scan data in order to convert one to the other. In effect, it applies its own "characteristic curve".

The problem is (1) their assumptions about what the negative looks like cannot be universally correct, because that depends on exposure habits and choice of development; and (2) their assumptions about what the tonal scale of the scan should be won't necessarily match yours.

For color negatives, as Scott pointed out, the profiles deal with the added complication of achieving reasonable color balance from emulsions that vary in a number of ways.

My interest is primarily in B&W, SilverFast is my standard scan software, but for my purposes the profiles for B&W film are pretty much useless. They never match what I want from a scan. So I scan my B&W negatives as though they were positive transparencies, setting the scan parameters to achieve a distribution of tonal values that's roughly what I want. Then in later processing I invert the scan and apply whatever additional corrections I need, depending on what I want to do with the scan.

EDIT: my post crossed with your response to Scott.

 

[Oren Grad]

Perhaps without the fixes the scanner gets 95% of the look of the film and the software fix provides that last 5%? Is that the way to look at this?

You never see the output of the scanner per se - you are always using some piece of software to drive the scanner and format its output for your viewing and manipulation. The default output of the scanning software, even without film-specific profiles invoked, is based on an implicit characteristic curve that assumes certain things about the input and the desired output.

Nothing wrong if you like the way the output looks using those default settings - use and enjoy! But there is a lot going underneath the surface in the software even at default settings. You are never just "looking at the film as it is".

 

[RattyMouse]

No. What you're missing is that nobody uses the negative as the final product, and when you go from the negative to a print, on-screen electronic image, or some other form of output, you are *always* transforming the original in some way. Most importantly, you are manipulating the tonal scale (and, in the case of color film, the color balance). For example, the tonal scale of Tri-X in a darkroom print depends heavily not just on the characteristic curve of the Tri-X film developed in whatever developer you use, but also on the characteristic curve of the paper you print on. You can make radically different-looking prints from a Tri-X negative simply by choice of paper.

What the SilverFast profiles do is make some assumptions about what the characteristic curve of the negative looks like for a given brand of film, plus some other assumptions about what the tonal scale of the scan should be, and it applies a transformation to the scan data in order to convert one to the other. In effect, it applies its own "characteristic curve".

The problem is (1) their assumptions about what the negative looks like cannot be universally correct, because that depends on exposure habits and choice of development; and (2) their assumptions about what the tonal scale of the scan should be won't necessarily match yours.

For color negatives, as Scott pointed out, the profiles deal with the added complication of achieving reasonable color balance from emulsions that vary in a number of ways.

My interest is primarily in B&W, SilverFast is my standard scan software, but for my purposes the profiles for B&W film are pretty much useless. They never match what I want from a scan. So I scan my B&W negatives as though they were positive transparencies, setting the scan parameters to achieve a distribution of tonal values that's roughly what I want. Then in later processing I invert the scan and apply whatever additional corrections I need, depending on what I want to do with the scan.

EDIT: my post crossed with your response to Scott.

Got it. Thanks for clarifying for me.