- Joined
- Dec 2, 2012
- Messages
- 7
- Format
- 35mm
Hello everybody,
this is my very first posting in this forum.
I am from Germany (so please indulge me for some false terms) and after some years of going digital have taken the fresh challenge of analogue photography, for reasons of limited space in my home with a hybrid workflow.
I´d like to describe my way of increasing the limited resolution of my Canoscan 9000f, which is not 9600 ppi but just about 1700 dpi (according the testresult of www.filmscanner.info ). I scan 35mm-negatives and slides with the pacific imaging proscan 7200 (in Germany distributed by the brand Reflecta) with decent results, the nominal resolution of 3600 ppi results in optical resolution of 3250 ppi (same source), wich is quite nice.
MF-material is being scanned in the above mentioned Canon-fb-scanner, wich means, that almost all of the resolution-advantage of middle format is lost due to limited scanner resolution.
As not everybody is owning a Nikon-highend-scanner, the following may be of some interest to others:
The software photoacute3 ( www.photoacute.com ) was developped to increase the picture quality of mobile phones and digital cameras. It does so by merging multiple pictures (with minimal shift from one picture to another) which results in higher resolution with less noise.
What I did was scanning 1 slide ten times, moving the slide a very tiny little bit with every scan. I used Vuescan, 3600 dpi, then resizing "bicubic sharper" to 1800 ppi (3.7 MP) in photoshop elements in order to get the most out of the scanner resolution. Then this 10 almost identical jpgs were processed by photoacute to a 13.7 MP picture.
One disclaimer: This is only about image resolution, not about dynamic range and colour-reproduction. I know about the importance of 48-bit-tiff or .dng for this aspects, but this was not the topic of this trial, so for reasons of processing-speed and conveniance the scanning and processing was done 24-bit/jpg-based.
This is the basic photo:
In the following 100%-Screenshots you can see: to the left the scan done by the Reflecta proscan7200, in the middle the result achieved by Photoacute3, and to the right Vuescan and PSE (4-times multiple scan, 7200 ppi downsized in 2 steps"bicubic sharper" to the same size, sharpening as much as possible) as good as it gets.
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8487/8238149670_39a6082f3d_h.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8479/8238147824_224c63d9f3_h.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8345/8237078023_4c478c1e10_h.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8342/8238143964_fc84bd7a56_h.jpg
Allthough the performance of the filmscanner is not matched, this cumbersome workflow can provide a considerable improvement when using flatbed-scanners, leading to Scans from 6x6 Slides of about 50MP (so a powerful computersystem is needed).
To be honest, it is not always that easy and successful, some attempts went out like this:
I guess the program is having difficulties with pictures that contain repetetive patterns (here the brickwall).
This surely has to be improved to get the optimum out of it, but for the first try I found the results to be quite impressive.
Has anyone heard of this (or simmilar) workflow before?
Regards
Christian
this is my very first posting in this forum.
I am from Germany (so please indulge me for some false terms) and after some years of going digital have taken the fresh challenge of analogue photography, for reasons of limited space in my home with a hybrid workflow.
I´d like to describe my way of increasing the limited resolution of my Canoscan 9000f, which is not 9600 ppi but just about 1700 dpi (according the testresult of www.filmscanner.info ). I scan 35mm-negatives and slides with the pacific imaging proscan 7200 (in Germany distributed by the brand Reflecta) with decent results, the nominal resolution of 3600 ppi results in optical resolution of 3250 ppi (same source), wich is quite nice.
MF-material is being scanned in the above mentioned Canon-fb-scanner, wich means, that almost all of the resolution-advantage of middle format is lost due to limited scanner resolution.
As not everybody is owning a Nikon-highend-scanner, the following may be of some interest to others:
The software photoacute3 ( www.photoacute.com ) was developped to increase the picture quality of mobile phones and digital cameras. It does so by merging multiple pictures (with minimal shift from one picture to another) which results in higher resolution with less noise.
What I did was scanning 1 slide ten times, moving the slide a very tiny little bit with every scan. I used Vuescan, 3600 dpi, then resizing "bicubic sharper" to 1800 ppi (3.7 MP) in photoshop elements in order to get the most out of the scanner resolution. Then this 10 almost identical jpgs were processed by photoacute to a 13.7 MP picture.
One disclaimer: This is only about image resolution, not about dynamic range and colour-reproduction. I know about the importance of 48-bit-tiff or .dng for this aspects, but this was not the topic of this trial, so for reasons of processing-speed and conveniance the scanning and processing was done 24-bit/jpg-based.
This is the basic photo:
In the following 100%-Screenshots you can see: to the left the scan done by the Reflecta proscan7200, in the middle the result achieved by Photoacute3, and to the right Vuescan and PSE (4-times multiple scan, 7200 ppi downsized in 2 steps"bicubic sharper" to the same size, sharpening as much as possible) as good as it gets.
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8487/8238149670_39a6082f3d_h.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8479/8238147824_224c63d9f3_h.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8345/8237078023_4c478c1e10_h.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8342/8238143964_fc84bd7a56_h.jpg
Allthough the performance of the filmscanner is not matched, this cumbersome workflow can provide a considerable improvement when using flatbed-scanners, leading to Scans from 6x6 Slides of about 50MP (so a powerful computersystem is needed).
To be honest, it is not always that easy and successful, some attempts went out like this:
This surely has to be improved to get the optimum out of it, but for the first try I found the results to be quite impressive.
Has anyone heard of this (or simmilar) workflow before?
Regards
Christian
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