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Scan film negatives with a DSLR
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Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 10:23 pm
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Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 10:23 pm
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Now first of all this is nothing to do with me, I have no idea about such things but it sounds like it will work. Plus the results look superb.

Is this old news or a great new idea?
http://www.petapixel.com/2012/05/18/how-to-scan-film-negatives-with-a-dslr/


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Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 10:33 pm
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Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 10:33 pm
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Old news: Poilu, I and others have been doing it for some years.


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Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 10:46 pm
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Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 10:46 pm
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Orio wrote:
Old news: Poilu, I and others have been doing it for some years.

Ah, very good Smile
I've never heard of it so thought I'd best share. I kind of expected this knowledgeable crowd to be ahead of the game Wink


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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 12:13 am
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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 12:13 am
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thanks scott. i cant have enough examples of how to do this!
tony


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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 4:56 am
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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 4:56 am
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Coincidentally, I put something up on my Flickr page last weekend about my own setup:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdarnton/7183241686/in/photostream


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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 11:17 am
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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 11:17 am
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mdarnton wrote:
Coincidentally, I put something up on my Flickr page last weekend about my own setup:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdarnton/7183241686/in/photostream

I'm doing it very similar, with a cheap repro stand (30€ new), Apo Rodagon R 75/4 and bellows and camera I already had.

Resolution is very impressive and much better than with usual scanners. Only the dynamic range out of the cam is often a bit lower than with decent scanners - but you can do PP or HDR to get anything out of the pic.
http://forum.mflenses.com/cewe-photo-cd-vs-epson-v500-vs-homemade-update-t48284.html
http://forum.mflenses.com/one-roll-lucky-shd-100-meets-my-new-digitalisation-method-t49684.html

Before I made that with a repro stand I used an old slide projector from GDR times (3€ on Ebay + 4€ shippment) which I modified by removing the lens, with a weaker lightsource (20W instead of 150W) and a milk glass (2,50.-€ locally) and used an Minolta Macro Rokkor 100/4 for reproduction. My results very also good but not exactly as good as with the repro Rodagon.



Last edited by ForenSeil on Fri Nov 23, 2012 1:17 pm; edited 2 times in total


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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 1:04 pm
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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 1:04 pm
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FS, does your setup only work for slides? could you do strips of film?
tony


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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 1:17 pm
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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 1:17 pm
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Relative to the dynamic range problem, I only do B&W negs, which don't stress the system at all, but my D300 has a range of about 8 stops. I have my eye on a Sony Nex-7 for this job or (much less likely to happen) a Nikon D800e, with, respectively 13+ and 14+ stop ranges. I wonder if the recent improvements in camera range would bring as much to scanning slides as I am thinking they will.


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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 4:08 pm
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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 4:08 pm
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rbelyell wrote:
FS, does your setup only work for slides? could you do strips of film?
tony

That was my old setup with the slide projector.
My new setup does also work very well for whole 36x negative roles.
I'm using an crappy continous film holder (I don''t know where to get them, myone is from an convolute) on a Dörr light table (~30€ new) on an repro stand. It looks pretty similar to Micheal's setup.

EDIT: I found a pic Smile


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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 8:19 pm
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Posted: Sat May 19, 2012 8:19 pm
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Are you using your Nex-5 for this job? I was thinking that a Nex-7 would be a nice bump from my D300 for this task, and I could use the same lens I use now.


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Posted: Mon May 21, 2012 9:38 pm
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Posted: Mon May 21, 2012 9:38 pm
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mdarnton wrote:
Are you using your Nex-5 for this job? I was thinking that a Nex-7 would be a nice bump from my D300 for this task, and I could use the same lens I use now.

Yes I'm using the NEX-5N. I think a big choke point are also the lenses... which lens are you using for your setup?
Maybe an Apo Rodagon D etc. will provide more resolution

The effective resolution of the NEX-7 is "only" about 20% higher as the resolution of the NEX-5N bye the way. But from D300 it will be a bigger stept.


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Posted: Mon May 21, 2012 11:12 pm
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Posted: Mon May 21, 2012 11:12 pm
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isnt the resolution question moot when one is comparing it to typical scanner resolution? i would imagine pretty much any decent cam/lens combo would render better than say the typical epson scanner, no?
tony


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Posted: Mon May 21, 2012 11:32 pm
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Posted: Mon May 21, 2012 11:32 pm
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I'm using the 55mm f/3.5 micro Nikkor, supposedly one of the best lenses Nikon has ever made. At any rate, I don't think resolution is a problem at this point--you can see I'm getting pretty even quality all the way from corner to corner. It certainly has more than my current camera uses. I'm hoping that more camera resolution will get me beyond grain aliasing, which I think I'm getting a dose of with Tri-X which is, unfortunately, my main film.

Yes, it's pretty easy to beat a flatbed, and what I have now is certainly reasonable. I'm just always looking for better.


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Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 8:38 am
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Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 8:38 am
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The post-processing tutorial is the essential part of this, I'll test if one can use it with Gimp.


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Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 12:55 pm
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Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 12:55 pm
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rbelyell wrote:
isnt the resolution question moot when one is comparing it to typical scanner resolution? i would imagine pretty much any decent cam/lens combo would render better than say the typical epson scanner, no?
tony

Yes - my Epson V500 which is known to be one best flatbed scanners below 500€ for film get's completly outresolved by my actual technique, even when it's set to the highest DPI settings available (which takes years to scan a single 35mm negative).


But I tried many lenses before I managed to find good and compareable cheap combo.
First I tried to use Helios 44, Minolta-, Zeiss Jena Tessar-, Pentacon-, Industar- and maybe more 50mm lenses and got always suboptimal results (flaring, low contrast, low resolution, reflections of the lens in the negative/slide, field of sharpness wasn't flat enough, focus shift when stopping down,...), than I tried two 100mm macro lenses (Minolta MD Macro Rokkor 100/4 was very good while Cosina 100mm/3.5 was inferior, had some CAs etc.) and some enlarger lenses (usable to good results) and finally I bought an Apo Rodagon R 75/4 (similar to the newer Apo Rodagon D) for less than 100€ which is visibly better than any lens I tried before.

Medium format enlarger (80mm, 105mm etc.) lenses are generally better for high magnification reproduction than 50mm enlarger lenses bye the way, as they are optimized for smaller enlargements.

Here's an example of my actual method, Lucky SHD100 was the bottleneck:



and a crop from the center

I know that Novoflex sold also lenses for 1:1 negative and slide reproduction (mostly Staeble Katagon 4/60 or 4.5/60 I think). They are often very cheap if you find one. I wonder how they perform against the more modern Repro-Rodagons etc.
There's currently at least one together with a Visoflex and a nice bellows set on Ebay: 230790098188

Last edited by ForenSeil on Fri Nov 23, 2012 1:22 pm; edited 2 times in total


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Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 2:43 pm
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Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 2:43 pm
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thank you FS, that is great and valuable information!
tony


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Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 7:29 pm
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Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 7:29 pm
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Just to add a bit:

If the shot warrants it I take about 6 shots of one slide and put them together with a stitching/panaroma tool.
Gives me an equivalent 140 megapixel scan.

Too much is never enough I say. Very Happy
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