Scanning old negatives

"Mardon" wrote:

Both the V700 and V750 will do up to 8"x10" negatives. I have found the
most convient way to scan 'off-size' negatives is to lay a sheet of thin
glass over the negatives rather than trying to use a negative holder. My
eye can't detect any degradation of the imgage by doing it this way. It
keeps the negatives perfectly flat and is far eaiser than trying to mess
with a custom negative holder.

Yep. Although I don't have a link, I understand that it is possible to find
"anti-Newton" glass on the net, which can reduce newton's rings somewhat.

My experience with photographic film was that you really don't want to get
film anywhere near the glass on a flatbed. So one trick would be to cut a
mask of thin carboard, put the mask on the scanner glass, the film on top of
the mask so the curl bulges upwards, and squash the film flat with the AN
glass. This is what I do with the glass carrier in the Nikon 8000 (whose
lower glass isn't anti-Newton). Fiddly and time consuming, but produces
great scans.

A few months agao, someone in this group asked if the V750 could
effectively scan 35mm, low contrast, positive microfilm. I did the scans
various ways and posted the results he
http://www.JustPhotos.ca/scantest/
The sample images may be of some interest to you.

It's interesting that you got useful images in reflective mode: I'd probably
not even have thought to try it.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

"tomm42" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Apr 16, 11:43 am, Dave S wrote:
Fred Martin wrote:
Stuart wrote:
I would like to gather opinions on the most appropriate film scanner
to purchase to archive a collection of my late father and
grandfathers b/w negatives, mainly 6" x 4". Some are glass plate the
most normal negs of street scenes and faces in the 1920's, 1930's and
1940's in Australia and New Zealand.

Would the Epson Perfection V700 Scanner be suitable? I looked at the
specs for the 750 and I doubt if I would need to go to a wet gate
scanner.

Something around the Epson price range - a bit higher would be okay.

Please reply to the group

or (remove the spaces)

n e t m a s k 56 at g o o g l e dot c o m

and the subject line Scanning old negatives

As an alternative to scanning, I would suggest you try what I did. I
have used a
light box and rephotographed many slides and also negatives of various
sizes
and have been very pleased with the results. I bought a Canon slide
scanner
originally to scan slides, but found that rephotographing them with my
digital
camera is just as good quality and much, much faster.

....Fred

I agree with the part about lightbox-rephotographing vs scanning slides.
Very significantly better!

However, when I tried this with negatives, I never got satisfactory
results on my attempts to neutralize the orange mask. Somehow the
hardware/software in the scanner can do this really quickly and
accurately, and a sequence of steps on PaintShopPro ended up with
mediocre results.

Dave S.


I have a Bessler slide duplicator with Schneider 80 f4 Componon slide
duping lens on it and the result don't have the dynamic range of my
Epson V700 when using a D200. They aren't bad, but not as good as a
scanner. A 58mb 16bit file is a little limiting if I want to print
large. I can get larger files with the scanner too, with 4x5s I scan
at 2400ppi and get a 500mb file in 16 bits. Nice if I want to make a
16x20 print. As for the orange mask, most transpaerency scanners take
care of it in the scanning program. I have used some older color negs
with a very deep orange base, and even those came out nicely requiring
only a little play with the color.

Tom


Many thanks to all for the valuable advice - I want to start the project
ASAP but I guess it will be about a month before I can start due to personal
reasons. Once I get going I will post my experiences. Have still to get a
good price in Sydney Australia for the V750.

I'm running XP SP2 with all updates, 1 gig of memory and virtually unlimited
HDD space.

On Apr 16, 10:37 pm, "Stuart" wrote:
"tomm42" wrote in message

oups.com...



On Apr 16, 11:43 am, Dave S wrote:
Fred Martin wrote:
Stuart wrote:
I would like to gather opinions on the most appropriate film scanner
to purchase to archive a collection of my late father and
grandfathers b/w negatives, mainly 6" x 4". Some are glass plate the
most normal negs of street scenes and faces in the 1920's, 1930's and
1940's in Australia and New Zealand.

Would the Epson Perfection V700 Scanner be suitable? I looked at the
specs for the 750 and I doubt if I would need to go to a wet gate
scanner.

Something around the Epson price range - a bit higher would be okay.

Please reply to the group

or (remove the spaces)

n e t m a s k 56 at g o o g l e dot c o m

and the subject line Scanning old negatives

As an alternative to scanning, I would suggest you try what I did. I
have used a
light box and rephotographed many slides and also negatives of various
sizes
and have been very pleased with the results. I bought a Canon slide
scanner
originally to scan slides, but found that rephotographing them with my
digital
camera is just as good quality and much, much faster.

....Fred

I agree with the part about lightbox-rephotographing vs scanning slides.
Very significantly better!

However, when I tried this with negatives, I never got satisfactory
results on my attempts to neutralize the orange mask. Somehow the
hardware/software in the scanner can do this really quickly and
accurately, and a sequence of steps on PaintShopPro ended up with
mediocre results.

Dave S.

I have a Bessler slide duplicator with Schneider 80 f4 Componon slide
duping lens on it and the result don't have the dynamic range of my
Epson V700 when using a D200. They aren't bad, but not as good as a
scanner. A 58mb 16bit file is a little limiting if I want to print
large. I can get larger files with the scanner too, with 4x5s I scan
at 2400ppi and get a 500mb file in 16 bits. Nice if I want to make a
16x20 print. As for the orange mask, most transpaerency scanners take
care of it in the scanning program. I have used some older color negs
with a very deep orange base, and even those came out nicely requiring
only a little play with the color.

Tom

Many thanks to all for the valuable advice - I want to start the project
ASAP but I guess it will be about a month before I can start due to personal
reasons. Once I get going I will post my experiences. Have still to get a
good price in Sydney Australia for the V750.

I'm running XP SP2 with all updates, 1 gig of memory and virtually unlimited
HDD space.


The V700 works well too, I believe you get a sightly better scanning
system and antiNewton glass with the V750. I questioned if the extra
$200 US was worth it. I got the V700 because my older flatbed bit the
dust (Epson Expression 1600) and the V750 wasn't out yet. The V700 has
been a great scanner, put away my older Nikon LS2000, cause the V700
was better.

Tom

What is "antiNewton glass" ???


tomm42 wrote:



The V700 works well too, I believe you get a sightly better scanning
system and antiNewton glass with the V750. I questioned if the extra
$200 US was worth it. I got the V700 because my older flatbed bit the
dust (Epson Expression 1600) and the V750 wasn't out yet. The V700 has
been a great scanner, put away my older Nikon LS2000, cause the V700
was better.

Tom

This what Newton's rings a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_ring

Newton's rings are created on a scanner when the film is in direct contact
with the scanners platen.
To prevent Newton's rings you elevate the film a short distance from the
glass or use "Anti-Newton Glass".

Anti-Newton glass prevents the creation of Newton's rings in your scan.

--
CSM1
http://www.carlmcmillan.com
--
"Barry Watzman" wrote in message
...
What is "antiNewton glass" ???


tomm42 wrote:



The V700 works well too, I believe you get a sightly better scanning
system and antiNewton glass with the V750. I questioned if the extra
$200 US was worth it. I got the V700 because my older flatbed bit the
dust (Epson Expression 1600) and the V750 wasn't out yet. The V700 has
been a great scanner, put away my older Nikon LS2000, cause the V700
was better.

Tom

Dave S writes:

However, when I tried this with negatives, I never got satisfactory
results on my attempts to neutralize the orange mask. Somehow the
hardware/software in the scanner can do this really quickly and
accurately, and a sequence of steps on PaintShopPro ended up with
mediocre results.

The right way to "neutralize" the orange mask is to use cyan filtering
in the lighting, adjusting it till the mask looks grey (to the camera,
not necessarily to your eye). An old enlarger colourhead with
continuously adjustable filtering would be a good way to do this.
After adjusting the mask to grey, you can then use an exposure that
uses most of the dynamic range of the sensor in each colour.

Without this illumination colour adjustment, you end up having very
little blue light when you're nearly clipping the red channel of the
sensor, and you can't capture a good quality image.

Once you've captured the image, converting it correctly from negative
to positive involves undoing the negative gamma curve. This involves a
function that looks roughly like

out = in ^ (-1.7)

which is a curve when plotted in linear space. The "invert" or
"negative" operation in most editors simply calculates

out = 1 - in

which is not a very accurate substitute.

Dave

In article , Dave Martindale
wrote:

The right way to "neutralize" the orange mask is to use cyan filtering
in the lighting, adjusting it till the mask looks grey (to the camera,
not necessarily to your eye). An old enlarger colourhead with
continuously adjustable filtering would be a good way to do this.
After adjusting the mask to grey, you can then use an exposure that
uses most of the dynamic range of the sensor in each colour.

without the benefit of an enlarger colourhead, do you have an idea of
roughly how much cyan filtration one might need to at least be somewhat
close?

also, what white balance is used on the camera? i vaguely recall you
once suggesting to white balance off an unexposed frame, for just the
orange mask itself.

nospam writes:

The right way to "neutralize" the orange mask is to use cyan filtering
in the lighting, adjusting it till the mask looks grey (to the camera,
not necessarily to your eye). An old enlarger colourhead with
continuously adjustable filtering would be a good way to do this.
After adjusting the mask to grey, you can then use an exposure that
uses most of the dynamic range of the sensor in each colour.

without the benefit of an enlarger colourhead, do you have an idea of
roughly how much cyan filtration one might need to at least be somewhat
close?

Unfortunately, no. I once wrote software for digitizing negatives, but
the camera had a monochrome sensor and colour filter wheel. I did the
colour balancing by adjusting the exposure time for the three exposures
independently.

For a very rough guess at the filters, start with the enlarger filter
pack recommended by the manufacturer when printing that film. Then
adjust from there. Having a camera that displays RGB histograms would
help by giving quick feedback on adjustments. You want the three
histograms to roughly line up under each other when the subject is
neutral.

also, what white balance is used on the camera? i vaguely recall you
once suggesting to white balance off an unexposed frame, for just the
orange mask itself.

Did I? I'd forgotten. That does get the camera to do the remaining
white balance calculations for you.

If you have Photoshop, you don't need an unexposed frame, either.
Just photograph the unexposed frame line or sprocket hole area, then
pick a suitable sample of that with the eyedropper tool to set the
"white" slider in the Levels tool. Presto- white balance adjustment
using any unexposed area as a reference.

Dave