My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner(blog.vladovince.com) |
My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner(blog.vladovince.com) |
Just for instance, the LS-2000 features in the post has an advertised optical resolution of 2700DPI, which means the absolute maximum megapixel resolution you can get out of that thing is a little over 10MP. Film scanners are notorious for overstating their optical resolution, which has nothing to do with the resolution of sensor used to digitize the image data and everything to do with the lens in the scanner. You can have a 200MP sensor scanning your film but if your lens can only resolve 1000DPI you will have a very high resolution image of a low resolution lens projection. It's maybe a little better than a flatbed and it features dust removal, but in the year of our lord 2024 the LS-2000 is not a good choice for scanning film.
As for his macro scanning setup, he appears to be using the digitaliza for film holding, which is a notoriously bad product with many known flaws. Negative supply makes a line of lower cost version of their very good film holders, and Valoi also offers an affordable system of components that I highly recommend. There is a ton of good information out there about macro scanning, and had the OP sought it out he could avoided his little adventure in retro computing.
Modern equipment has similar warts. Flatbed scanners are bad film imagers for a number of reasons, a few which you already wrote. There's a huge volume of new products coming out for scanning right now (film holders, copy stands, light panels, etc) but these setups are very inconvenient to set up or, to be charitable, demand practice and perfect technique. There's always people ready to insist they have an easy convenient time setting up their SLR scanners and capturing 1000 rolls at 9999 DPI in 2 minutes. I don't share their experience.
During the pandemic I tried to proof-of-concept a path forward without any real success:
- The first attempt involved modifying a Plustek scanner to take medium format. This ended up taking a ton of work for each medium format frame (4 captures for each of the 4 quadrants, and each of those is already slow for a single 35mm frame). Stitching these captures is tedious and flaky for images that don't have obvious sharp features.
- The other involved rigging the objective of a Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II on a Raspberry Pi HQ camera onto an Ender printhead to raster over the film with a light table. This could have worked but it had many mechanical problems I am not cut out to solve (lens mount, camera-to-film-plane alignment)
Leaving aside designing a proper optical path there are 2 killer problems:
- the problem of mechanically manipulating the negative and keeping it in focus
- the problem of stitching together partial captures with minimal human intervention
A few people seem to be working on open source backlit line-scanners but as far as I know no central path forward has emerged. I hope someone figures it out.
That being said, this was a one-off, but once I had enough overlap with each capture, PTGui was able to switch it together relatively hands-free, even with it having lots of sky.
I sold it on eBay years ago, then researched what might be better. The general opinion was that consumer-accessible scanning peaked with the Minolta Dimage Elite 5400 II. Of course these were long out of manufacture, but I managed to find one new in the box on a small auction site. To this day I haven't gotten around to scanning a single piece of film with it. Maybe this post will finally get me off my ass...
https://epson.com/For-Work/Scanners/Photo-and-Graphics/Epson...
It has a white panel on the inside of the lid which ruins a lot of scans. I always put black card on top of my scans.
That's probably the best scanner for photos. And I used to own a $25K Hasselblad too.
Make sure you clean the platten and the photos before scanning to save hassle later on dust removal.
I used those Epsons for scanning tens of thousands of old photos.
Start with a good scan, and there is so much good post-processing software out there now to help correct fading etc on old images.
I now use a system from Negative Supply.
I don't do much scanning anymore, but I do have an ancient Nikon CoolScan 35mm scanner that's probably at least 20 years old now. I get it out every few years to scan something I found and, with Vuescan, it still works remarkably well.
Although the last time I fetched it out from a storage container by our barn (I really should store it in the house) I found the negative strip scanner wasn't working anymore, but the slide adapter did and that was good enough for the task at hand.
I shoot 35mm and medium format and the Coolscan pulls extraordinary detail from the negatives - vastly better than the best flatbed scanners I've ever used.
With the author lamenting about SD cards being awkward; it reminds me of one thing has been immensely useful with the A7 III is the built-in FTP auto-upload. This surprised me as reviews didn't mention it, and as a seeminly high-end consumer camera I wasn't expecting such a "professional" feature. I just have it upload everything to my NAS.
Now my next task is to do the same with thousands of dirty slides, which is turning out to be far more challenging...
SCSI isn’t scary. It wasn’t scary in 2006 and it shouldn’t be scary today.
I share the same age as this writer, if not very close since the life events are similar e.g. high school in mid 00s. I find having a dark room and using proper technique and developer, or even Lightroom processing 10-50x more complicated then running a vintage Mac OS 9 or diving into scsi hardware.
It should not deter anyone and it had the same languish by people in the same time period.
After all these years I think manually mapping IRQs or having pop the side of the case off to move jumpers around for IRQs to be more challenging. I’m just surprised to read that SCSI is annoying. I wonder when I’ll be reading similar Context about using IDE drives or serial ports (okay baud rate issues can be annoying).
By all means not to be negative, article is excellent. I just see it as a trope: “scsi is hard”
Nearly all of the good consumer-grade scanners (i.e. those that use CCD sensors) are out of production and use software that is no longer maintained. The main market for scanners has become receipts, which has lead to a switch to cheap CIS sensors since quality no longer matters.
Outside of expensive specialized scanners, the Epson V600 is pretty much the only scanner in production still using a CCD sensor and it came out in 2009. It has nearly doubled in price over its lifetime to $350 due to lack of competition and I presume inflation. It is the de facto scanner used in the trading card world because of the output quality and ability to create templates within the software (I 3D printed my own brackets to be able to scan/crop 4 cards at a time perfectly every time). But last I checked MacOS support is pretty much gone and even Windows is barely tolerable. Its days are probably numbered, too.
I ended up with a flatbed and not a film scanner because I wanted to scan 4x5 negatives.
If I were being rational, I'd just get an A7R or Fuji's medium format DSLR for 90% of my photos and have 4x5" and larger negatives professionally scanned. For proofing, I always found taking a picture of the negative on a lightbox with my phone and inverting to be adequate. If you like the photo in that form, then you'll like the professional scan.
I would love for more efficient workflow to scan the few thousand slides I still have.
There must be some 3D printing plans for film holders on the flat bed.
It would be handy to take it apart to clean the bed glass, but I daren’t if it breaks.
Obviously they could make a single stage adapter but I didn't find it if it exists.
I was delighted when I opened the scanner tool in fedora/gnome for laughs and it showed the (networked) machine as a scanning source. And I selected it. AND IT WORKED. I never even had to set it up!
I remember the only challenge getting my TMA flatbed scanner working with Ubuntu Studio in 2010 was downloading an extra xsane package.
Amusingly enough, I found that my B&W Ilford film shots (on all three different film types I tried) have way less detail (or "resolution") than standard iso400 Kodak color film.
This area of tech seems totally stagnant (obviously) but seems like a great time for someone with some hardware smarts and interest to innovate for low cost.
The key to great DSLR scanning is a proper, high-quality light table (I built my own) and a high quality macro lens (high quality != expensive). Adobe Lightroom always worked best for stitching, Adobe Photoshop and others had some issues for some reason. Cleaning dust off as much as possible before taking the mosaic images is vital to reduce post-processing time.
If you've got a good workflow and don't have to scan hundreds of frames a week it's a great process that's a great deal cheaper, gives better results than even drumscanning if done properly and can be faster than having a lab scan it for you.
Here's an example of a 6x8 DSLR scan. Taken with a 20MP Sony DSLR with 60mm (90mm FF equiv) macro lens by Tamron. Downsampled to 13MP image resolution from the 300+MP scan mosaic because that original mosaic file was about half a gigabyte in size. 1: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1...
Here's one taken as a single frame with the Sony DSLR without any stitching. 2: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1...
> high-quality light table
What light source did you use?
> Lightroom worked best for stitching
Time to blow dust from my Autopano Pro license! (Yes, it still works on macOS 15.1 on Apple Silicon).
I poke fun at film shooters today who heap praise on e.g. Kodak Gold or the cheap Fuji equivalents because it's all they can really afford/get their hands on. I wouldn't have even considered shooting it 10 years ago
I had a VCR of similar reputation, which also suffered from a noise-filled image coincidentally (the Panasonic AG-1960).
> What light source did you use A simple LED strip light, you know those flexible ones. They were glued on the inside (just the bottom panel) of an aluminium box 30x40x8cm and then a frosted acrylic panel was placed on top. While the light color is not that important I chose a neutral white. But I reference each scan images white balance from a reference image of the light table so it gets compensated anyway. Worked like a charm when I still shot analog. Gone digital now unfortunately as the costs just rose too quickly as a college student. Still miss my Fuji GX680 sometimes, but I'm also really happy with my Fuji X-Pro 2.
The main reason I shoot film is for higher resolution than digital. I can easily get 100 megapixels from my 4x5 negatives. I have a nice shot of the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn, and you can zoom in on the TIFF and read the road signs on the FDR across the river. I think that's neat. That's what I'm out for.
The real problem with most scanning setups is actually getting accurate color out of color negatives. The common wisdom these days is to use high-CRI light, but I believe that approach is flawed. Film scanning is not an imaging challenge, but a rather a densitometric one. You don't actually want to take a photo of the negative in a broad spectrum because the dyes in photo negatives were never intended to be used in a broad-spectrum context. You actually need to sample the density of the dye layers at very specific wavelengths determined by a densitometric standard (status M) that was designed specifically for color negative film. Doing this with a standard digital camera with a bayer sensor is... non trivial and requires characterizing the sensor response in a variety of ways.
Basically the hardware is easy, the software is hard.
I’m also curious about your comments on the light source. Although you’re 100% correct about the way the wavelengths are specified in the data sheets, the reality has always been different. When I was printing color in the darkroom, our enlargers were very basic lights with subtractive color filters. Dedicated film scanners used either fluorescent or basic LED backlights. Have you run into color reproduction trouble that you’re sure relates to the illuminant or sensor response curves?
Although I had success with PTGui and it "just worked", I didn't fancy paying for it and instead used Hugin in the end. This lead me to take around 63 pictures with 50% overlap.
The film was a 4x5 negative and after stitching I'd say the effective DPI was ~4500
https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/10/14/the-adobe-adapt...
The AI denoise is fantastic, too:
https://gregbenzphotography.com/lightroom-acr/acr-17-ai-adob...
