Scanning with a camera supporting pixel shift

[Adrian Bacon]

I found that with a little work in Camera Raw, I could make the "normal" shot look quite competitive. And getting rid of the sky grain/noise isn't really much of a problem if I wanted to do it.

Of course this is only n=1....and my knowledge/brain power is way below Adrian Bacon's to appreciate that significance. So, unless there's something vastly skewed about this comparison, I think this has scratched my itch to try pixel-shifting scanning. Doesn't seem to be a magic bullet, or even a significant incremental difference.

Thanks so much!

Yeah, I have to say, if anything, this has me even more firmly on the fence about whether pixel shifting is worth the trouble. I have no doubts that it can deliver more usable detail if well done, and if it works for those that do it, great, but myself... for the environment that I operate in, going to that trouble isn't going to make me any more money. Over 90% of what I deliver to customers is ~4000 pixels on the long edge or smaller, by customer request, and almost nobody in my customer base regularly prints larger than 8x10 or 8x12, so the 45MP that I natively capture at is more than sufficient for the vast majority of use cases, and in the next year or so it's going to get even more absurd as Canon is rumored to be prepping a 100MP+ camera for release, which I likely will be jumping on as the shutter on my current capture rig will be nearing end of life at that point. Native sensor resolution will get to the point where I'll be able to just set the rig up to capture 6x9 120 film and all other smaller formats are nothing more than a crop from that for most customer requested resolutions. I know that sounds like heresy for a lot of people here, but in my operating environment, time is money and having one static setup that never changes that you can just blast film through at one frame every 5 seconds or faster is how you make money.

 

[McDiesel]

Unfortunately the part which can't be uploaded online for sharing is the AGONY of dealing with vibrations. Dog walking downstairs? You get artifacts. Wind gusts? You get artifacts. Truck on the street? You get artifacts. Carelessly breathing during capture? You get artifacts. And even if you don't see any artifacts you don't really know if the detail you're seeing is affected or not.

In my view, 16-shot capture is useless unless you are on a concrete slab and also willing to do stacking to deal with field curvature + negative flatness issues, and at that point you're in the scanner category in terms of time per frame.

 

[Helge]

Unfortunately the part which can't be uploaded online for sharing is the AGONY of dealing with vibrations. Dog walking downstairs? You get artifacts. Wind gusts? You get artifacts. Truck on the street? You get artifacts. Carelessly breathing during capture? You get artifacts. And even if you don't see any artifacts you don't really know if the detail you're seeing is affected or not.

In my view, 16-shot capture is useless unless you are on a concrete slab and also willing to do stacking to deal with field curvature + negative flatness issues, and at that point you're in the scanner category in terms of time per frame.

Have you considered using a diffused flash for backlight?
Might not work with sensor shift, but hobo shift might work.
Hobo shift is just slightly shifting either film or camera between exposures and then merging.
With rotation any aliasing from the pixel grid will go away too.
It will not give you super resolution alone, but it will take out many sensor related artefacts.
The luxury/"agony" alternative is to macro and stitch.

 

[Helge]

@Helge actually, HP5+ is a better patient for high-res scanning because of grain. I find grain to be a more visible indicator of a poor scanning, even at a small magnification/reproduction. This photo captured all the detail I needed and then some, that's why I almost never use slower films in medium format.

While the scanning is fine, you clearly haven't "emptied out" the grain yet.
The visible grain is really largely stochastic clusters of smaller grain, plus what you are seeing is mostly the top layer of grain, as that is what defines the optical interface in the gelatine emulsion.
That is one of the reasons why "grain" does not define resolution.
The wire structure on the hill for example, with the nice contrast against the sky, looks like it might very well have more to "say".

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Have you considered using a diffused flash for backlight?
Might not work with sensor shift, but hobo shift might work.
Hobo shift is just slightly shifting either film or camera between exposures and then merging.
With rotation any aliasing from the pixel grid will go away too.
It will not give you super resolution alone, but it will take out many sensor related artefacts.
The luxury/"agony" alternative is to macro and stitch.

The challenge with using flash for multiple exposures is flash output variation from exposure to exposure. Unless the flash uses modern IGBT electronics and has extremely fine control over the flash duration and the flash power, flash to flash exposure can vary by as much as +-1/3 of a stop. The smaller/newer units generally have that down to less than +- a quarter of a stop, but it's one more variable to have to deal with when trying to merge multiple exposures.

 

[McDiesel]

@Helge The subsequent improvements have no practical applications for me, but I will keep pushing nevertheless. This tinkering is almost as interesting as photography itself. I will look up Hobo shift, thanks.

 

[brbo]

You have hobo shift already integrated into your flat. For free, no extra charge.

 

[Empyreus]

Looks like all the image links are dead.

 

[PhotoPham]

Looks like all the image links are dead.

still works for me, I just clicked on a few and loaded just fine.