Interesting film scanning tutorial

[Jao]

I came across this film scanning tutorial and enjoyed it as well as learning some interesting things, apologies if anyone has already posted this.

 

[VirtualAdept]

That was indeed interesting. Gonna give it another watch this evening when I've got time

 

[excalibur2]

Great for that winning shot but to do each neg on a 36 exp roll taken in different light conditions

 

[ChrisR]

I had the feeling he was a bit confused; why go to all that trouble locking the film base colour if he's using Vuescan raw and doing the inversion in ColorPerfect? Is locking the film exposure (based on an unexposed bit of film) important if you're using raw?

I think Brian's right; if you had cheap or quick scans by some other means, and decided from them that this was the shot you wanted to work on, then go for it... But he was scanning at 3600 dpi and getting 100 MB files, and he suggested scanning at 7200 dpi, which would theoretically give files 4 times the size. I seem to remember him promising to talk about resizing down, but don't remember seeing that bit.

What was really interesting to me was seeing how simple using ColorPerfect could be. I've seen excellent results from it by someone else (@Mr_T) using one of my files (starting from an uncorrected scan of the negative as a positive transparency), but he muttered about having to fiddle about with the settings, which rather put me off! (See this thread.) But my 45MB TIFF turned into a 185MB TIFF once it had been through the process!

 

[Steve]

Thanks for this.

I'm really struggling with my scanning, mainly with Velvia. Although this was for colour film, I assume it would also cover slide film.

Does anyone us vuescan? It looked pretty good in this video, and I googled it and found lots of positive comments.

I'm wondering if vuescan and colorperfect could solve my Velvie woes.

 

[ChrisR]

I'm really struggling with my scanning, mainly with Velvia. Although this was for colour film, I assume it would also cover slide film.

Does anyone us vuescan? It looked pretty good in this video, and I moosed it and found lots of positive comments.

I'm wondering if vuescan and colorperfect could solve my Velvie woes.

That's the second time I've seen "moosed" when I suspect "g**gled" was intended! [EDIT: did it to me, too!]

Several things here. I use Vuescan now; I started with Silverfast, but I always found it difficult, and the upgrade was expensive, and it's tied to one scanner, and now the original version won't work after an OS upgrade! Vuescan Pro is much less expensive than the Silverfast upgrade, and works for any scanner, including most all-in-one printer/scanners! It's pretty powerful, and seems to work pretty well. Some of the tools are a bit crude, e.g. I find the curves tool really hard to manage, but for one man and a dog it's brilliant. However, the film emulsion presets are a bit poor, witness the thread I pointed to above.

Now, I think ColorPerfect is intended for either inverting colour negatives, or for digital camera raw processing, and not for transparency processing. However, the basic idea of the first part of the tutorial is to get a raw scan and move it into LR, and maybe to PS, to do the adjustments. It's possible that would be a better workflow for transparencies?

Are you using Epsonscan now? I've never tried it, but quite a lot here do...

 

[ChrisR]

On further reading on their site, it appears that ColorPerfect does have features for positive images; I know no more than that!

 

[skysh4rk]

Thanks for this.

I'm really struggling with my scanning, mainly with Velvia. Although this was for colour film, I assume it would also cover slide film.

Does anyone us vuescan? It looked pretty good in this video, and I moosed it and found lots of positive comments.

I'm wondering if vuescan and colorperfect could solve my Velvie woes.

Vuescan is good, but like anything in photography, it requires time to master and it certainly is no magic bullet. Its biggest advantage is that it works with many different brands of scanners, so you don't need to relearn anything if you upgrade or have multiple scanners. I actually use it with my printer/copier/scanner/all-in-one machine and my Epson flatbed that I only use for film.

Colorperfect really will not help much, if at all, with transparencies; it is intended primarily for colour negative.

 

[Steve]

Not sure how googled turns into moosed

Thanks for the advice. Having read this, and some other articles have decided to get Vuescan and then take it from there.

 

[Paul-H]

Hi

I am in the early days of using this software to slowly convert many years of medium format negs and sadly these days I only have access to an Epson 4490 scanner so it's a slow process.

Using Vuescan to make the RAW files and colour perfect to convert, I am using it for both colour and B&W negs and am actually getting very good results.

Mind you scanning 6x6 negs at 4800dpi 48 bit is producing files of around 800mb each and my 2TB Drive is quickly filling up and I am only about 20% through my stack of negatives.

PerfectColor is not an easy bit of software to use but once you get there it works very well.

Paul

 

[steveo_mcg]

Hi

I am in the early days of using this software to slowly convert many years of medium format negs and sadly these days I only have access to an Epson 4490 scanner so it's a slow process.

Using Vuescan to make the RAW files and colour perfect to convert, I am using it for both colour and B&W negs and am actually getting very good results.

Mind you scanning 6x6 negs at 4800dpi 48 bit is producing files of around 800mb each and my 2TB Drive is quickly filling up and I am only about 20% through my stack of negatives.

PerfectColor is not an easy bit of software to use but once you get there it works very well.

Paul

I'd reduce your scan resolution, you'll not see much benefit beyond 2400 on this scanner. Your mostly extrapolating at that resolution and even the native 3200 is limited by the optics of the scanner.

 

[ChrisR]

I've just downloaded a demo version of ColorPerfect, and instilled the plugin in Elements 9. I found what I thought was the TIFF from the thread I referred to above, to practice on, and loaded it into PE9. Turns out it's already inverted, perhaps it's the result of @Mr_T's efforts? Second thing, PE9 complained that it was a 16-bit file, said it didn't support. The options were to flatten it, which would have given me limited editing possibilities, apparently, or to convert to 8-bit. I decided on the latter, for the trial, and tried to call ColorPerfect via the filters menu. It comes up, but no image. No idea what to do next; the Help is useless. This ain't easy!

 

[ChrisR]

After some searching I located an old TIFF in my oldest Time Machine backup, which was the scan of the negative referred to in the thread I mentioned above, as a transparency, done with Silverfast. I loaded it into PSE9, and this time I selected all of the image, and called the ColorPerfect filter, and up popped the inverted image. It didn't look good, and I had to fiddle a bit, first to find an appropriate emulsion (not even ColorPerfect includes Fuji C200, so I tried Superia 200) and then fiddled around with various other parameters, but I got a fairly good version of the old image. Not much point in showing you as it is covered with watermarks as a trial image, but I got somewhere. On input it was 45MB TIFF, and after conversion a 58MB TIFF. I will experiment some more... (and probably view the tutorial again!)

 

[srichards]

I've always used vuescan. i tried silver fast once and dumped it straight away.

It generally works ok but now and then its a bit freaky.

 

[s162216]

@ChrisR C200 is in colourperfect, just look up Fujicolour 200 which is its generic name (and was called for years until Fuji decided to do some re-branding).

 

[ChrisR]

@ChrisR C200 is in colourperfect, just look up Fujicolour 200 which is its generic name (and was called for years until Fuji decided to do some re-branding).

How odd, couldn't see it in mine although I do remember seeing Fujicolour 100!

 

[skysh4rk]

Hi

I am in the early days of using this software to slowly convert many years of medium format negs and sadly these days I only have access to an Epson 4490 scanner so it's a slow process.

There's nothing wrong with the 4490. It has basically the exact same specs as the V500. The only difference is the lamp in it. I have one myself.

Mind you scanning 6x6 negs at 4800dpi 48 bit is producing files of around 800mb each and my 2TB Drive is quickly filling up and I am only about 20% through my stack of negatives.

As @steveo_mcg has suggested, I would definitely reduce the DPI significantly as you're just making the files bigger (and adding heaps of time), but not actually resolving any additional detail at all. For 120 film, I wouldn't go any higher than 2400 and even then I would argue that might be too high.

I'd strongly recommend planning your scanning around the intended print sizes. I personally think the 4490 and V500 are best suited to printing 6x6cm frames up to 8"x8" or maybe 12"x12" at 300dpi, although this depends on a lot of factors (e.g., quality of the scans, film flatness during the scan, personal preferences, etc.; not to mention the photograph itself), so individual mileage will certainly vary.

 

[s162216]

How odd, couldn't see it in mine although I do remember seeing Fujicolour 100!

Looking at my trial version I can't see it either (it's been quite a long time since I last looked at Colourperfect so I was probably thinking of the 100); I imagine the the 100 will probably give near identical results though.

I have just noticed though that in the film manufacturer drop down, both "Agfa" and "AgfaPhoto" are listed. AgfaPhoto films are all re-branded from other manufacturers films, and there is actually an option for "Vista Plus 200", which as we already well know is just rebranded Fuji C200 so try using that!

 

[ChrisR]

I have just noticed though that in the film manufacturer drop down, both "Agfa" and "AgfaPhoto" are listed. AgfaPhoto films are all re-branded from other manufacturers films, and there is actually an option for "Vista Plus 200", which as we already well know is just rebranded Fuji C200 so try using that!

Ah, I wondered about that, but didm' have it open at the time. Will try!

At the moment I'm struggling with how to get the results back from Elements into Aperture; I thought there would be some sort of "return" button, and when I click "save" it asks me where to put it! I'll work it out, no doubt.

 

[ChrisR]

OK, this time I located the 16/48-bit negative TIFF of the frame I was experimenting before, the thread about exposing for negatives. It was taken on Portra 160, and I managed to get it through Aperture into PSE9 (using 8-bit psd files) and then into ColorPerfect. I did the inversion with the Kodak Portra 160 preset. I may have tried to make some small adjustments to back and white points and gamma, to make it look less terrible, but then I tried to put them back to where they were. Exit back to PSE9, and then a simple Save (after changing the preferences to make it simply save in place) to get it back into Aperture, where it has appeared as a stacked version.

However, it does look awful (ignoring the horrid watermark, but rather looking at how grainy or noisy the clouds look):



For comparison, the best scan I managed to get (focusing particularly on getting detail in those clouds, rather than the colour) direct from Vuescan using the Portra 160vc preset was:



I can only think that this means using the 8-bit psd file into PSE9 and back is a problem, and that I would need Photoshop proper and 16-bit files for a better result. But I'm not at all sure!

 

[Strapps]

Thanks for this.

I'm really struggling with my scanning, mainly with Velvia. Although this was for colour film, I assume it would also cover slide film.

Does anyone us vuescan? It looked pretty good in this video, and I moosed it and found lots of positive comments.

I'm wondering if vuescan and colorperfect could solve my Velvie woes.

I use VueScan and Lightroom 5. I've got the best results from Velvia by resetting everything in VueScan to default values, then adjusting the hue and saturation sliders in Lightroom.

 

[ChrisR]

There's also the thread that @stevelmx5 put up about his Velvia scannng workflow....

 

[Paul-H]

I'd reduce your scan resolution, you'll not see much benefit beyond 2400 on this scanner. Your mostly extrapolating at that resolution and even the native 3200 is limited by the optics of the scanner.

Thanks

I thought the optical resolution of this scanner was 4800dpi, that's what it claims on in the instructions, am I missing something

Paul

 

[excalibur2]

Thanks

I thought the optical resolution of this scanner was 4800dpi, that's what it claims on in the instructions, am I missing something

Paul

There was a lot of confusion over dpi but recently we have sussed it out (well most of it) and it's:- On the net it has been mentioned (lets assume it's not parroting) that cheap Epson scanners give a true dpi of about 1600dpi and the expensive ones about true 2400 dpi from then above, it's the software fiddle. Well there is some truth in this as the scans from Asda at 1800 dpi with a £20,000 scanner shows the same detail (only detail) as my V750 at any scan dpi. Well it doesn't end there as there is dpi and dpi as Paul's Cezanne or drum scanner would give better quality results at 2000 dpi than any flatbed scanner also scanning at 2000 dpi.
Anyone agree with all above.

Edit above is for 35mm. With larger negs you get better results from all Epson flatbed scanners...so far I can't remember if any one has said "why" ? Well I would suggest one reason is the mechanical mechanism has less problem scanning larger negs.

 

[PMN]

Well it doesn't end there as there is dpi and dpi as Paul's Cezanne or drum scanner would give better quality results at 2000 dpi than any flatbed scanner also scanning at 2000 dpi.

The Cezanne is a flatbed.

 

[excalibur2]

The Cezanne is a flatbed.

well there are flatbeds and there are flatbeds

 

[s162216]

Thanks

I thought the optical resolution of this scanner was 4800dpi, that's what it claims on in the instructions, am I missing something

Paul

Its not so much a "software fiddle" as Brian puts it; simply although the sensor itself can resolve the quoted optical resolution, the optics in the scanning path limit the actual resolved resolution of the scans so you don't gain any greater information after a point and it usually just results in bloated files - scanning test charts the Epson V500 for instance resolves about 1700 dpi and the Epson V700/V750 both about 2400 dpi despite all claiming 6400 dpi; to be honest they are telling the truth so to speak... just at the sensor only and not in actual scanned images.

I suppose it's almost like a "hardware interpolation" (I can't think of a better way to describe it) as the pixels there are directly generated by the sensor without any software manipulation, but theres no additional information actually pulled out of the negative etc.

 

[excalibur2]

Its not so much a "software fiddle" as Brian puts it; simply although the sensor itself can resolve the quoted optical resolution, the optics in the scanning path limit the actual resolved resolution of the scans so you don't gain any greater information after a point and it usually just results in bloated files - scanning test charts the Epson V500 for instance resolves about 1700 dpi and the Epson V700/V750 both about 2400 dpi despite all claiming 6400 dpi; to be honest they are telling the truth so to speak... just at the sensor only and not in actual scanned images.

I suppose it's almost like a "hardware interpolation" (I can't think of a better way to describe it) as the pixels there are directly generated by the sensor without any software manipulation, but theres no additional information actually pulled out of the negative etc.

Interesting though when you read the info on these expensive scanners they say something like max dpi 3200 and not boast of 9800 dpi etc.................................................
Also Samuel IIRC we haven't sussed out exactly why an Epson flatbed scanner gives a better result with a larger neg, well I've edited my previous post with a suggestion?

 

[PMN]

Interesting though when you read the info on these expensive scanners they say something like max dpi 3200 and not boast of 9800 dpi etc

Because the people high end scanners are aimed at are harder to fool than the general public.

Also Samuel IIRC we haven't sussed out exactly why an Epson flatbed scanner gives a better result with a larger neg, well I've edited my previous post with a suggestion?

At the risk of sounding a tad insulting (which is in no way my intention), isn't it kind of obvious why bigger formats give better results? I'm a bit puzzled by why you ask this!

 

[excalibur2]

Because the people high end scanners are aimed at are harder to fool than the general public.



At the risk of sounding a tad insulting (which is in no way my intention), isn't it kind of obvious why bigger formats give better results? I'm a bit puzzled by why you ask this!

Well go on then let everyone know by saying why ....when you do your own printing it's obvious, but I would wager not many people know how a scanner actually works and would guess if you select a very tiny crop of a 35mm neg and the same size crop on a 120, the scanner would find it easier to work on larger negs and give a better result for that reason alone.

 

[PMN]

Well go on then let everyone know by saying why ....when you do your own printing it's obvious, but I would wager not many people know how a scanner actually works and would guess if you select a very tiny crop of a 35mm neg and the same size crop on a 120, the scanner would find it easier to work on larger negs and give a better result for that reason alone.

The scanner doesn't care how big the format is. It won't have an easier time or give any better results scanning a square centimeter of 120 than it would a square centimeter of 135, the higher quality of larger format scans comes simply because you have more information in the larger bit of film.

 

[Paul-H]

There was a lot of confusion over dpi but recently we have sussed it out (well most of it) and it's:- On the net it has been mentioned (lets assume it's not parroting) that cheap Epson scanners give a true dpi of about 1600dpi and the expensive ones about true 2400 dpi from then above, it's the software fiddle. Well there is some truth in this as the scans from Asda at 1800 dpi with a £20,000 scanner shows the same detail (only detail) as my V750 at any scan dpi. Well it doesn't end there as there is dpi and dpi as Paul's Cezanne or drum scanner would give better quality results at 2000 dpi than any flatbed scanner also scanning at 2000 dpi.
Anyone agree with all above.

Edit above is for 35mm. With larger negs you get better results from all Epson flatbed scanners...so far I can't remember if any one has said "why" ? Well I would suggest one reason is the mechanical mechanism has less problem scanning larger negs.

Thanks for this

I just did a couple of test scans using my 4490 the same 6x6 neg scanned at 1200, 2400 and 4800 dpi and can confirm that the lowest quality was at 1200 and the best at 2400 with 4800 although close to 2400 but not enough to warrant the huge file sizes.

Trouble is I suspect I am going the have to start again with the 20% I have just done at 4800

Paul

 

[steveo_mcg]

Thanks for this

I just did a couple of test scans using my 4490 the same 6x6 neg scanned at 1200, 2400 and 4800 dpi and can confirm that the lowest quality was at 1200 and the best at 2400 with 4800 although close to 2400 but not enough to warrant the huge file sizes.

Trouble is I suspect I am going the have to start again with the 20% I have just done at 4800

Paul

Nah just down size them in GIMP or what ever. You'll not lose anything and it'll be much quicker than rescanning.

 

[excalibur2]

Well I always scan my 35mm negs at 4,800 dpi ( if results from the Asda scanner shows I have a few winners) but I don't get any more detail but what it does in simple terms is "bunch the pixels closer together" and the picture looks nicer especially if enlarging or cropping or printing say A4...afterwards I would downsize (or even downsize the Asda scans) as most of my shots are for forums, but you could still keep the winners at 4,800dpi for backup.

 

[Strapps]

I normally scan at 2400dpi but recently I've been using the TIFF file size reduction setting in Vuescan for images I'm only looking to share online to keep the resulting files at a manageable size.

Haven't looked too deeply at how that impacts on the quality but I've been pleased with the results.