Scanning with my camera, not as easy as I thought

[BorisM]

So I've been trying to digitalize my negatives and I am doing something (very) wrong. I have a Pentacon duplicator, I've set it up with Canon 5D and a 50mm 2.8 Tessar. I have some seven BW negatives that need to be scanned, Ilford FP4, HP5 @800 and 3200 and Delta 3200 @6400, so all of them are pretty different.

The problem, I think, is that I don't know what a photographed negative is supposed to look like. Histogram is pretty off, images are too low on contrast and when I fix the photo according to histogram, everything goes too dark, blacks go black hole dark. I could go with that if I had only low ISO films, the real problem is with those highly sensitive negatives. I've made contact prints that show more detail and better contrast that this digital stuff, so I know it can do a lot better.

I've attached three stages of work, first one is the look of the negative when photographed, second is view on histogram and third is histogram "fixed" one. I have seen all those manuals on how to scan with DSLR but nowhere have I seen anyone with this particular problem. God knows what will happen when I go on colour negatives!

Has anyone got any idea what am I doing wrong?

 

[BorisM]

And here are the photos of the "rig".

And thanks for your help in advance.

 

[jeffreyg]

I'm not that much into digital capture but I do scan my negatives (to make digital prints) and also enlarge negatives for pt/pd printing. Why not try scanning a negative to make a positive adjusting in PhotoShop or such and once you are satisfied reverse that to a negative image.

HOME

 

[L Gebhardt]

You want to shoot RAW format. Set the camera's exposure to almost clip the clear area of the negative. This will keep the noise from the camera down. The negative will not have nearly the contrast range that the original scene did. So you will end up stretching the captured image. So you want the image exposed all the way to the right since the lighter zones have more bits per zone/stop (bad explanation - look up Expose to the Right).

You may also want to use a flash (or daylight) instead of an incandescent light since you will get all three channels with about the same exposure. This will also hep cut down on digital noise For color negatives you definitely want to use a daylight balanced light source, and maybe one that's extra blue to balance out the orange mask (I haven't tested this).

It's probably easiest to adjust the levels with a curve. That way you can invert and adjust the end points all in one step. Finally you can adjust the midpoint of the curve to set the gamma. This last step is probably what you are missing that makes the image look too dark even if the histogram is full scale.

 

[gmikol]

Since you're using a Canon, you might want to try using DPP and converting using the "Linear" option, then applying a Levels layer in Photoshop with a gamma (center slider) of 2.2. Then try making your adjustments to invert and eliminate the mask.

Use a custom white balance, with something close to a 6500K light source. A 3200K photo flood plus an 80A filter would get you close, and it's what I've used when doing something similar with slides. A flash, as L Gebhart suggests, would work as well, but still use a custom WB instead of the Flash setting.

This should come as close to emulating what a scanner does as possible. You may need to play around with doing the inversion before the Gamma=2.2 layer. Using the camera's default tonal response curve will definitely mess things up.

Best of luck--

Greg