Ten years ago I started digitizing all my family prints, negatives and slides. For my prints that lacked the original film material, I used an Epson flatbed scanner, I cropped the photo's of the scan files with Photoshop and developed these to decent JPEGs. For all my thousands of negatives and slides I found a flat bed scanner disappointing, scanning is a lot of work and I choose to do it the best way possible. So I bought at ScanDig a brand new Nikon Coolscan V for € 900,- with SilverFast software to achieve what I had in mind. Nikon then already had stopped producing its scanners and prices were already getting higher and higher. In four years I scanned all my film material that I always had stored well organized, and I developed fine skills how to do that from 120 Mb TIFF files to decent 3-5 Mb JPEGS. The workflow started with Silverfast and was finished with Photoshop. During a scan (2-3 minutes) I did the digital processing of the former TIFF so there was no time lost. About two evenings a week I processed one complete film each. Four years later all my material was digitized, and stored in clouds, DVD's and hard disks and I used my Coolscan so seldom I decided to sell it. Buying, and not renting one had been a good decision, Coolscans were very looked after and I sold it for more than I bought it new...
But sometimes I still shoot film (Kodak Ektar) on my K2 and ME-super, just for fun, and my friends and family also know my skills on scanning... So I experienced how I could digitize these with my K-01. I found some info on the internet, but scanning color negative this way is pretty delicate to do. Choices for the best light source, blue filtering to neutralizethe red cast, white balance etc. resulted in a steep learning curve and I am happy now I found the right way to do it. The results are similar or even better than I achieved with my Coolscan, the digitizing itself goes rapidly fast, but the post processing takes more time, most for healing dusts and scratches. The advantage of the Coolscan is its Digital ICE; the pre-infrared scanning to identify dusts an scratches and repair this automatically with the Nikon software.
For anyone who wants to digitize its films I would like to share my experiences on how to do this in the right way. I only explain the procedure for color negative. Slide and B&W are rather easy to do if you own the skills for doing color negative. First of all; all the color information of your photo is captured in a narrow color space, so you must shoot RAW (16-bits) and develop in 16-bits. At the end you shrink to 8-bits and JPEG. My experience is that there is not more information on 35 mm film material than 10-12 Mpix, the resulting format is 3600x2400 or max 4500x3000. In my childhood I used to play with FisherTechnik. I still own it, now waiting for grandchildren, and I created a lay up with it for my scanning procedure. You can grab it for little on Marketplace here. The best light source is a larger Philips LED Bulb (18,5W 2700K), it offers equal warm white light and gets not too hot for the paper cilinder cover I use and the film itself. The light spectrum fits good with the color layers in the film and the RGB pixels on the sensor. I tried cooler light, blue filtering, tungsten light, but 2700 K LED is OK for the job.
I shoot RAW, the coolest possible manual White Balance (see picture below). Lens mounted is a 100 mm Macro (first M, later DFA, both are very good) at F8 or F11, ISO 100 and 1/500 - 1/1000. Nail the focus wide open on the grain in the film and be aware the whole spectrum in the film is covered in the histogram. I shoot with 2 sec timedelay to avoid any shaking, this is working good. Be aware of clean film strips and take care during the shootings.
For the workflow of digitizing I use Photoshop / Camera RAW. Now the magic begins... Screenshots of how it works are shown below.
Upload the RAW file to your computer, open it in Camera RAW. I use CS5 by the way...- Crop the 3:2 frame, the histogram info shows just the info inside the cropped frame
- Put the Temperature on 2000 K, Recovery on zero, Fill Light on zero, Brightness on zero, Contrast on 50
- Now shift the "Tint" slider to the position that the blue channel in the histogram will be covered behind the other colors. Most that's nearby zero position. In fact you are compressing the histogram.
- Finally adjust the "exposure" slider so the histogram expands to the rightside, and adjust the "blacks" slider to expands the histogram to the left side. What we are doing here is to expand the histogram as far as possible to get all the available information in full 16 bits color depth.
- I always do some sharping in Camera RAW: Sharpness 50/1.0/2.5/0 , Color NR is 25 and Detail 50.
- Now press on "Open Image", the 16-bits file will be loaded in Photoshop.
- First thing I do is cropping it: 45cm x 30cm at 100 pix/cm, this results in a 4500 x 3000 pixels file.
- To reduce digital noise and grain, choose Filter / Noise / Despeckle. This halves your file size without losing real sharpness.
- Now invert your picture to positive; Image / Adjustments / Invert.
- With the Levels menu you can make a brilliant picture of it; Image / Adjustments / Levels.
- Expand for each color the histogram to full width (see screenshots) and press OK.
- After that, tweak to good color balance by adjusting the central sliders for each color in the same histograms.
- Not satisfied? Try to adjust the output levels under the histogram for each color, for instance, with the high Output Red you can cool a sky that is coloring toored. Press OK.
- PS-experts; there are many more controls for the best results, I leave it here to the basics.
- Now try "Auto Levels" and "Auto Color", sometimes this is the finishing touch, sometimes it worsens your result, then you undo it easily.
- Finally pimp your result with some "contrast" and/or "vibrance" in your adjustments menu.
- Remove dust, scratches and unwanted feet... with the healing brush tool in PS.
- Now reduce by Image / Mode to 8-bits and save as a JPEG-file level 10.
First picture is the old original Coolscan-file, second one the recent result as described here. The Coolscan file is a bit cleaner due to the ICE-mode, the K-01 scan is more crisp and shows no halos. The Coolscans sometimes does show linear halos (line-sensor) near clipping contrasty areas. When you get used to this procedure, and you own some PS-skills, scanning with a RAW camera really goes fast. Most work is caused by restoration of damaged film and dirty sensors. Because you are expanding the dynamic range so much and use small lens opening, you will see every anomaly in blue skies etc.
My youngest son's face is expanded to 100% to see the difference, the left one is K-01 scan, the right one the original Coolscan. The boy has grown now over 1.90 meters...
I hope this is helpful and useful for you, please reply your improvements, I am still in a learningcurve... Thnx!
Coolscan first, K-01 scan second:
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