What Computer Platforms are people using to process their DSLR scans? Cameras?

[albireo]

Rawtherapee is free and open source...

apologies. It was another one then. Removed the name from the original message.

 

[runswithsizzers]

I'm puzzled by all the people using Fuji cameras with Xtrans sensors to scan their precious film.

One of the reasons why I entirely left digital cameras behind years ago and went back to film cameras and a dedicated film scanner was how poor my Fuji XT-20 Xtrans sensor was at rendering fine detail.

The in camera jpegs (which were wonderful with my Nikon DSLRs) were pathetic with the Fuji. Many people reported the same issue with demosaicised Fuji output, and the phenomenon was often described as "Fuji worms" or "Fuji painterly effect". At the time the only tools able to somewhat ameliorate the worms issues were expensive third party tools like Rawtherapee etc. Adobe raw made a mess out of them, worse worms that the in camera jpegs.

Perhaps Fuji has fixed this later on, but personally I would never put an Xtrans sensor of that generation close to my negatives.

If you say you were not happy with your Fuji in-camera JPEGs, then I can't argue with your experience. My own experience with two Fuji X-Trans cameras goes back to 2017, and includes both in-camera JPEGs and RAW files processed with Adobe Lightroom Classic. I have over 7,000 Fuji photos in my Lightroom catalog, and I have never seen either of the issues you describe in my own files. But then I rarely look at any of my photos at any zoom level greater than 100%, so maybe the effect can only be seen at unrealistically high magnification levels?

If there ever was a problem due to Adobe software creating problems with Fuji RAW files, then I believe it has long since been resolved. It's hard to find credible discussions about these issues that are not at least four or five years old.

It is possible to induce the so called worms effect in Fuji cameras -- and other brands, including Bayer sensors -- by using the wrong combination of sharpening settings. And the "watercolor effect" can be induced by too-agressive noise reduction settings. These are user error problems, not Fuji X-Trans problems.

If your assumptions were true (it is impossible to get fine detail from Fuji X-Trans sensors without painterly / wormy effects), then why would so many people be using Fuji cameras to digitize film? Answer, they wouldn't. The fact that there are so many Fuji users digitizing film strongly suggests Fuji users are not experiencing the issues you describe.

 

[koraks]

This is just a kind reminder with an eye on possible avenues this thread might take from here:

Let's please keep this thread focused on suitable equipment and procedures for film digitization, specifically. I notice the thread is starting to diverge in the direction of the quality of digital cameras as such. That's fine to discuss, but please do so here: https://www.photrio.com/forum/forums/digital-cameras-and-capture.360/
I'd also like to draw attention to this part of the forum rules:

4. All photography is valid. There is no need to argue that one particular breed of photography, approach, technique, etc. is better than something else (e.g. analog/digital discussions). Discussions along these lines tend to follow the pattern of religious and political debates and generally don't end well. We, therefore, don't encourage them and will generally put a stop to them.

While it's evidently fine to discuss the technical qualities (or lack thereof) of certain pieces of equipment, let's steer clear of formulations that imply some form of moral judgement.

 

[albireo]

If you say you were not happy with your Fuji in-camera JPEGs, then I can't argue with your experience. My own experience with two Fuji X-Trans cameras goes back to 2017

My experience probably predates yours. I stopped using digital cameras round about 2018. Perhaps the issues I mention were solved by the time you approached this technology.

I am not by the way making this up. Plenty of evidence posted over the years by several sources on the difficulty of demosaicing Fuji X series raw files, and my SOOC jpegs had the same issues.

I am not a pixel peeper if that's what you're suspecting, and yet I saw the painterly effect immediately on the out of camera jpegs, without any custom Photoshop work. Even my wife commented on the weird rendition of trees, grass and bushes from these cameras.

Perhaps my camera was defective.

Mind you, I loved the concept and the ergonomics of those cameras, but for my taste the OOC jpegs of a cheap Bayer Nikon DX sensor (I had a D3200, I think the sensor in that one was a Sony 24Mp design) were much better.

 

[albireo]

This is just a kind reminder with an eye on possible avenues this thread might take from here:

Let's please keep this thread focused on suitable equipment and procedures for film digitization, specifically. I notice the thread is starting to diverge in the direction of the quality of digital cameras as such. That's fine to discuss, but please do so here: https://www.photrio.com/forum/forums/digital-cameras-and-capture.360/
I'd also like to draw attention to this part of the forum rules:

While it's evidently fine to discuss the technical qualities (or lack thereof) of certain pieces of equipment, let's steer clear of formulations that imply some form of moral judgement.

No moral judgement implied by me. However - understood, I will stop here.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

I'm puzzled by all the people using Fuji cameras with Xtrans sensors to scan their precious film.

One of the reasons why I entirely left digital cameras behind years ago and went back to film cameras and a dedicated film scanner was how poor my Fuji XT-20 Xtrans sensor was at rendering fine detail.

The in camera jpegs (which were wonderful with my Nikon DSLRs) were pathetic with the Fuji. Many people reported the same issue with demosaicised Fuji output, and the phenomenon was often described as "Fuji worms" or "Fuji painterly effect". At the time the only tools able to somewhat ameliorate the worms issues were expensive third party tools. Adobe raw made a mess out of them, worse worms that the in camera jpegs.

Perhaps Fuji has fixed this later on, but personally I would never put an Xtrans sensor of that generation close to my negatives.

I too am quite mystified by it. Much of the reasoning behind the x-trans sensor design made sense back in the day when resolution wasn’t that high. Trading color resolution for less need of an anti-aliasing filter on paper sounded good, but in reality made for a very challenging to handle raw file and introduced a whole host of other, way harder to handle image artifact issues.

Add on to that using such a sensor to scan color negative film and then run it through a very color sensitive (and color usage intensive) algorithm to get to a positive image… why on earth use a sensor that gimps your color resolution to do that? I personally never would.

That being said, I want my software to succeed, so if most people insist on using x-trans sensors to scan their film, I’ll put in the effort to get the best results I can, but I just wish people would at least be aware that from a purely technical perspective, for scanning color negative film, bayer sensors give significantly better results, especially when it comes to color fidelity of the scanned negatives.

 

[GLS]

Sony A7RIV + Sigma 70mm ART Macro + Negative Supply 5x7 Light Source Pro to digitise with.

16-shot pixel-shift captures are merged via Sony's Imaging Edge software. Lightroom for cataloguing and applying flat-field corrections with a blank shot of the light source. Some simple processing is done in LR also, including baseline sharpening of the RAW files. For slides I apply my IT8-calibrated custom camera profile here. Colour negs are converted with NLP. Final editing for all kinds of film is performed in Photoshop, because it allows better control.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Sony A7RIV + Sigma 70mm ART Macro + Negative Supply 5x7 Light Source Pro to digitise with.

Awesome combination. I still have the Sigma 70mm ART Macro too. Man... that lens delivers the resolution. The only reason I migrated away from it to the RF 100 Macro was because I could get the rotating collar for the RF 100 which made it a lot faster to handle rotating the camera for 645 and half frame negs.

16-shot pixel-shift captures are merged via Sony's Imaging Edge software.

Do you do that for all frames or just special ones?

 

[GLS]

Do you do that for all frames or just special ones?

All.

 

[Wallendo]

Sony a7ii, minolta Af 100/2.8 with adapter, Apple iMac with Mi processor and 16G memory. Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop.

 

[Romanko]

16-shot pixel-shift captures are merged via Sony's Imaging Edge software.

What it is the output resolution? How big are the files and how hard/slow are they to edit?

I have a similar set-up and wondering if I should start using pixel-shift myself. I used 16-pixel-shift once to scan a slide but I am not sure I want to use it to digitize my negative scans.

Also, can you apply lens corrections while stitching your shifted images in Imaging Edge?

 

[Sean]

I too am quite mystified by it. Much of the reasoning behind the x-trans sensor design made sense back in the day when resolution wasn’t that high. Trading color resolution for less need of an anti-aliasing filter on paper sounded good, but in reality made for a very challenging to handle raw file and introduced a whole host of other, way harder to handle image artifact issues.

Add on to that using such a sensor to scan color negative film and then run it through a very color sensitive (and color usage intensive) algorithm to get to a positive image… why on earth use a sensor that gimps your color resolution to do that? I personally never would.

That being said, I want my software to succeed, so if most people insist on using x-trans sensors to scan their film, I’ll put in the effort to get the best results I can, but I just wish people would at least be aware that from a purely technical perspective, for scanning color negative film, bayer sensors give significantly better results, especially when it comes to color fidelity of the scanned negatives.

You'd probably want to shoot RAW and use CaptureOne, specifically designed for x-trans files.

 

[GLS]

What it is the output resolution? How big are the files and how hard/slow are they to edit?

I have a similar set-up and wondering if I should start using pixel-shift myself. I used 16-pixel-shift once to scan a slide but I am not sure I want to use it to digitize my negative scans.

Also, can you apply lens corrections while stitching your shifted images in Imaging Edge?

240.9 MP. I capture the entire film area in one go, regardless of format, filling the digital frame as much as possible whilst leaving a small gap to allow for any required straigtening tweaks. For 4x5 I end up with files of around 190 MP once cropped to the image area. For 6x7 around 170 MP. For 6x6 around 130 MP. For 6x12 around 155 MP.

The original RAW files are 1.8 GB each. Once these are worked on with multiple layers the resulting PSB files can grow to 3-4 GB each. Storage is cheap though, and these days I only digitise and work on keepers. I haven't encountered too much difficulty or slowdown whilst editing, but then I have a reasonably well-specced PC (4 GHz i7, 32 GB RAM, SSD scratch disk).

There are only very limited lens corrections available in Imaging Edge, but that doesn't matter; they can be applied to the merged RAW file in LR as normal.

 

[JerseyDoug]

When I bought my first X-trans camera, a Fuji X-E2, I was still using Lightroom. I found that Iridient X-Transformer did a better job with the X-trans files, especially color files. I had replaced the X-E2 with an X-T20 and replaced Lightroom with Affinity Photo by the time I started digital camera scanning. I compared Affinity and Iridient's handling of X-trans RAW scans and didn't see a significant difference in 8x12 prints.

I am now scanning both 35mm and 6x6 B&W negatives with a single shot of the X-T20. That produces a 24 MP 35mm scan and a 16 MP 6x6 scan. My "large" 120 prints are 12" by 12". Comparing my Epson P700 inkjet prints with equivalent size darkroom prints I made from the same negatives many years ago the inkjet prints from the 16 MP scans are visibly sharper. What size prints are people making from all of these very large files?

 

[Adrian Bacon]

When I bought my first X-trans camera, a Fuji X-E2, I was still using Lightroom. I found that Iridient X-Transformer did a better job with the X-trans files, especially color files. I had replaced the X-E2 with an X-T20 and replaced Lightroom with Affinity Photo by the time I started digital camera scanning. I compared Affinity and Iridient's handling of X-trans RAW scans and didn't see a significant difference in 8x12 prints.

I am now scanning both 35mm and 6x6 B&W negatives with a single shot of the X-T20. That produces a 24 MP 35mm scan and a 16 MP 6x6 scan. My "large" 120 prints are 12" by 12". Comparing my Epson P700 inkjet prints with equivalent size darkroom prints I made from the same negatives many years ago the inkjet prints from the 16 MP scans are visibly sharper. What size prints are people making from all of these very large files?

In my experience owning and running a film lab, most people that want prints make 4x6 and 5x7 prints, and the scans are rarely more than 2048 pixels on the long end. I give the options to get 2048 pixels, 4096 pixels, and 8192 pixels on the long end of 35mm film with a 16 bit TIFF option for the two larger sizes and easily 90%+ of all processing orders are for the 2048 pixel jpegs, and even then, I still regularly get questions about why the files take up so much space. I recently started turning the compression up make smaller files for the 2048 pixel scans to try to alleviate the number of questions/complaints about scan sizes.

I know this is probably a foreign concept to most people here on this platform, but most of these people are downloading and looking at their scans on their phones over the cellular connection. They don't want big files, and don't give a flying hoot about the technical details. I don't offer TIFF scans for all the scan resolutions because doing so more often than not precipitates asking what the difference is between jpeg and tiff and I got tired of having to explain it multiple times a day. I already have to explain the difference in scan resolutions to most first time clients, so one less thing to have to repeatedly spend time on is desirable. If it wasn't for the fact that some clients actually want more resolution, I'd just offer one resolution, the small one.

 

[Romanko]

If it wasn't for the fact that some clients actually want more resolution, I'd just offer one resolution, the small one.

This is standard for many labs here. My favorite lab (Rewind Photo Lab in Sydney) offers:

Short side: 8" (2400px)@300dpi JPEGApprox 5.2mb file size + TIFF $5 per roll - Standard
Short side: 16" (4800px) @300dpi 8-bit TIFF Approx 85mb file size - High resolution

16-bit TIFF is not offered.

 

[erikbrammer]

Hello Adrian,

I am also interested. I am using a range of 35mm cameras and MF 645, 6x6, 6x7 and 6x17. Both colour and BW negative films. I develop BW myself and have C41 developed by a lab. Since I got the 6x17 Shen Hao, I use an Epson V850 with Silverfast 9 Ai. I camera-scan all other formats with a Fujifilm GFX 50R, and the conversion of colour negatives is where I still have a gap in my workflow. All MacOS, BTW.

I used to use Capture One in conjunction with Analog Toolbox from Michael Wilmes with mixed results, especially in terms of even and consistent white balance. I then became a beta tester of FilmLab 3.0 and I am generally quite happy with it. I would love to see a histogram and/or clipping indicators added, plus (very important, I think) TIFF exports in colour spaces other than sRGB (for further editing and printing large). There has been silence around FilmLab since March, so I can only hope its development continues. If someone has any updates, I would love to hear.

I have also tried out Filmomat Smart Convert but it doesn't save conversion edits in sidecars or the like, and it doesn't have a histogram or clipping indicators eithers.

So in essence, I would love to bridge that camera-scan inversion gap with a solution that meets my requirements I have just expressed here. If your solution does all these things, I am very interested.

Best regards,
Erik

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Hello Adrian,

I am also interested. I am using a range of 35mm cameras and MF 645, 6x6, 6x7 and 6x17. Both colour and BW negative films. I develop BW myself and have C41 developed by a lab. Since I got the 6x17 Shen Hao, I use an Epson V850 with Silverfast 9 Ai. I camera-scan all other formats with a Fujifilm GFX 50R, and the conversion of colour negatives is where I still have a gap in my workflow. All MacOS, BTW.

I used to use Capture One in conjunction with Analog Toolbox from Michael Wilmes with mixed results, especially in terms of even and consistent white balance. I then became a beta tester of FilmLab 3.0 and I am generally quite happy with it. I would love to see a histogram and/or clipping indicators added, plus (very important, I think) TIFF exports in colour spaces other than sRGB (for further editing and printing large). There has been silence around FilmLab since March, so I can only hope its development continues. If someone has any updates, I would love to hear.

I have also tried out Filmomat Smart Convert but it doesn't save conversion edits in sidecars or the like, and it doesn't have a histogram or clipping indicators eithers.

So in essence, I would love to bridge that camera-scan inversion gap with a solution that meets my requirements I have just expressed here. If your solution does all these things, I am very interested.

Best regards,
Erik

Taking notes. Though, I’d like to clarify that my tool is a negative to positive conversion tool, not an image editor, so the tooling, knobs, and dials it has is for getting that conversion in a form that can then be pulled into an image editor of choice for further tweaking if desired and it’s optimized for bulk conversion of whole rolls.

Also, be prepared to take what you know about color negative conversions and what you typically have done in other software and throw it out the window and start with a blank canvas of how to get there with the tooling, knobs, and dials of my user interface. When I first started this code project, it was from a position of seeing a lot of people on the internet giving a lot of conflicting information that sort of worked. I then did a bunch of research on how RA-4 paper got there and realized that a lot of the stuff online for digital scanning color negatives was either overly complex, or just plain wrong, and slow and tedious to boot. This led to an early version of what ended up being what Simple Image Tools is today. So in short, you’re probably going to have some ”wait, what?” Culture shock moments once you start using it because it simply doesn’t even have the same tooling, knobs, and dials that you’d typically expect to see with an image editor because it’s not an image editor.

 

[erikbrammer]

Thanks, Adrian, still interested as long as I get high-quality TIFFs that I can then edit in Capture One. What will likely be very interesting and useful for this community here is your learnings concerning RA-4 paper.

 

[koraks]

What will likely be very interesting and useful for this community here is your learnings concerning RA-4 paper.

Yes, I agree - although I'd like to invite @Adrian Bacon to address this in a separate thread so that the present one can remain focused on equipment/tooling choices.

 

[gorbas]

I'm also very interested Adrian. For camera scanning I'm using Nikon DSLRs D610 and D810, Current Mac OS.
99.9% of my work is BW but looking forward to see what your app can do.
All the best