Processing black and white film scans

N

Nebular89

Suspended / Banned
Messages
422
Edit My Images
No
I have a small copy stand, a film holder and a macro lens. The actual scanning process I’m fine with. I just want to know if there is a better way of processing the “scans”.
Currently I just crop them, invert them in photoshop with ctrl i, convert to black and white and then adjust the levels. Then I edit that file in capture one.
I can’t think of another way of doing it but I was just wondering if that’s the best free way. I don’t scan enough to need negative lab pro for example. I don’t use colour film anyway
 
That's a good question.... I couldn't install the software for my old Epson flatbed scanner on my W11 installation, so I played around with my digital camera, zoom lens and a close up add-on lens (like a filter). I download to my Ubuntu system, crop, invert and play with simple levels etc on the free, simple software "gThumb" (it has similar functionality to the Windows s/w "Faststone").
I would like to know if there's a few tips to help improve the process (although I am happy with it at the moment).
 
I had an Epson scanner. Once I’ve set everything up I find this way to be faster. Purely because I can tether my camera with capture one.

I think inverting and adjusting the levels is all the Epson software does anyway. I always had decent results with that when I used 120 film. I don’t often use film now so I scaled everything back a lot
 
There's a list of some of the post-capture software you can use in this post in the Big Film Scanner thread. Any more suggestions would be welcome!
 
For black and white (most of the film I do) I've found that almost any method works well enough. I've started using Negative Lab Pro in Lightroom more for the ease of doing things in bulk (and the ability to easily process colour negatives), but prior to that just inverted the images and went from there.

Lots of the softwares have some sort of flattering curves already built in which is a helpful starting point and can save some time if you have a lot of images to get through, but I don't think they're really any more 'powerful'. If a method is working for you then there's nothing that's good enough to be worth messing with it as far as I can tell!
 
I don't use (nor have ever used) Capture One, but there's a workaround in the standard LR that would allow you to do batch conversions.

It's a bit of a cheat, but you could easily create a profile that would invert and add contrast (or whatever else you like) to a batch of images and then edit them one by one if needed. You essentially pull the tone curve so it goes the other way. The blacks become white and the whites become blacks.

Then you save that as a profile and select all and apply it to all. There may be a way to do this all within Capture One and cut out the Photoshop step (which I imagine is the laborious bit).

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAqakbDFBS8
 
Last edited:
I’ve just started inverting the negative using the curves tool, the levels tool still works as normal that way. I haven’t used Lightroom in a long time but in Capture 1 you can apply a saved preset on import. I’ve saved the inversion as a preset so as soon as they’re imported they are instantly converted. They need a lot of tweaking after but for doing stuff in batches it’s really fast.
Plus I use the tethering with Capture 1 so I don’t need to import any files, I just get an inverted photo pop up ready to be edited. The only downside is I keep forgetting to change the folder the tethered captures are saved too
 
Nebular89 said:
I’ve just started inverting the negative using the curves tool, the levels tool still works as normal that way. I haven’t used Lightroom in a long time but in Capture 1 you can apply a saved preset on import. I’ve saved the inversion as a preset so as soon as they’re imported they are instantly converted. They need a lot of tweaking after but for doing stuff in batches it’s really fast.
Plus I use the tethering with Capture 1 so I don’t need to import any files, I just get an inverted photo pop up ready to be edited. The only downside is I keep forgetting to change the folder the tethered captures are saved too
Click to expand...
Yeah - I forgot about the sliders - they do work in reverse using that method.
 
Kell said:
Yeah - I forgot about the sliders - they do work in reverse using that method.
Click to expand...
Yeah the sliders do. I usually use auto levels for a quick contrast adjustment on all my photos and adjust the levels more if I need to, thankfully the auto tool still works fine. Using that it’s really quick.
I used to invert each frame in photoshop first so to the sliders all worked normally. For a single frame or maybe a roll of 120 it wasn’t too bad, for a 36 roll of 35mm it took far too long
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top