scanning negative film with sony a7 and enlarging lens

[seanE]

(Repost)

Hi guys,

I made a scanning rig for my 35mm negative film with a 75mm enlarging lens, and my A7. Old colour and newly developed B/W is what I'm scanning, When I scan the colour ones the tones are all over the place, and by the time I've got them under control I've lost a lot of my colure detail, They look like they were shot on a cheap smart phone, What am I doing wrong?

Im using my iPhone 4s as a light source ''just a bright white photo''

Im now shooting at around f8/iso100/6seconds which is giving me better results, There still a little bland, but they are old cheap negatives

Il post some pics of my setup, I made the scanning unit detachable, i use the bellows and enlarging lens as a kind of awkward super macro

 

[albada]

Hi Sean, I made a rig consisting of a Pentax K-3 digital camera, a macro lens (with extension tube), a film-holder to hold a negative-strip, and a diffused light-source behind the negative. The light is an LED-panel with an opaque white food-bowl over it. All this is mounted on a wooden board. Like you, I couldn't get the colors right. It turns out that there are cross-channel effects in C-41 which the printing-process removes. In a scan, you must remove them digitally. Note that when taking pictures, set your camera's white-balance to "daylight" or "5500K" or "none" for the correction-method below to work properly.

I use Gimp (free download) to edit photos. Here are the steps I use to fix the colors in Gimp: Use the Curves tool (Alt-c c) to multiply all three channels by about 75%; the purpose is to prevent the following additions from clipping at 255. Use the Channel Mixer (Alt-c o x) to add 40% of the red channel to the green channel. Then add 40% of the red channel and 20% of the green channel to the blue channel. I wrote a Gimp plug-in to do these steps; I can send it to you if you wish. After doing these steps, you still need to set the black-point and white-point of each channel based on its histogram (Curves tool). After this, it only takes a little more tweaking in Curves to get the picture right.

Good luck,

Mark Overton

 

[pellicle]

Hi

I've recently been working with a guy who wants to use a digital camera instead of a scanner. I've found that processing the RAW file in either ACR or RawTherapee allows sufficient highlight recovery.

You'll need to tune your exposure carefully and not use auto exposure. I'd suggest a better light source than the iPhone, but that's me.

Keep in mind that the highlights are the shadows.

Aside from the limitations of tuning the cameras exposure my old pages still are exactly the method I follow with C-41 neg and there is no magic in getting levels right if you follow these steps

http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/2009/10/quick-negative-scan-tutorial.html

yes that page is 7 years old now, yes it still works.

Here is a sample from his OM-D which I processed in RawTherapee...

all in all (aside from the fact there is no ICE and handling is a futz and dust is annoying, and ...) its almost as sharp as the LS-4000

 

[pellicle]

Hi

I've recently been working with a guy who wants to use a digital camera instead of a scanner. I've found that processing the RAW file in either ACR or RawTherapee allows sufficient highlight recovery.

You'll need to tune your exposure carefully and not use auto exposure. I'd suggest a better light source than the iPhone, but that's me.

Keep in mind that the highlights are the shadows.

Aside from the limitations of tuning the cameras exposure my old pages still are exactly the method I follow with C-41 neg and there is no magic in getting levels right if you follow these steps

http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/2009/10/quick-negative-scan-tutorial.html

yes that page is 7 years old now, yes it still works.

Here is a sample from his OM-D which I processed in RawTherapee...

all in all (aside from the fact there is no ICE and handling is a futz and dust is annoying, and ...) its almost as sharp as the LS-4000

 

[pellicle]

sorry about the above duplicate post ... was unable to remove it

Anyway, we've done both the 35mm and 120 roll now (645 size) and I thought I'd share that here too

http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/2016/05/digital-camera-as-film-scanner.html

the short answer is that for 35mm its comparable for details but colour negative is problematic and for larger formats it gets decreasingly worth while when compared even to an old Epson flatbed.

Best Wishes