I'll give that a proper look and post results. My machine is in many small pieces at the moment.
I'll give that a proper look and post results. My machine is in many small pieces at the moment.
Here's some results from a dry vs. wet mount of a Provia 400X slide. First, this is entirely unprocessed output from Capture One. I adjusted the light source RG and B values until I saw a desired white in the lighthouse, just slightly warm for the time of day, late afternoon. All other settings were at default. No additional sharpening, which I normally do. I'm masking the area outside the image and using a lens hood for both.
I routinely used a polarizer with the Mamiya 43mm, I routinely regretted it as well. A grad filter would have been a much better choice here. Like I said earlier, I have lots of bad images to test with, but I digress.
Dry mounted I can see a slight curl in the film even though this was stored flat and seemed so until light grazed the surface. In the 100% crop below it doesn't show very much but in the center areas of the film the sharpness is noticeably affected. Another difference is the color of the sky, lighter, more washed out in the dry mounted test. The grass seems more harsh to me dry mounted, the wet being of subtle but noticeably better tonality.
As for dust, I have much more in my wet mount and I believe that's due to contaminates in the lighter fluid I'm using, and that 'm reusing a sheet of mylar so no conclusion should be drawn regarding dust. Likewise scratches, this is not the test for that and I need to obtain some respectable wet mounting fluid before I get any more scientific.
It does seem to me unless the magnification ratio (1:1 here) were reduced to increase DOF that wet mounting will produce a sharper scan by virtue of film flatness alone.
In this image I had one orphaned image (top left) and I used dust and film edge, picking only 3 control points manually to tame it well. Control point errors were an absurdly low .1 pixel.
Color accuracy is extremely good here comparing the output to the original slide. The blues are spot on and the grass a dying green. I don't like the image but I do like the scanner's output very much as with color neg. The amount of work to get there for this image was zero once the light source was neutralized. How this will apply to different rolls of film I have yet to find out but it takes perhaps three or four test shots at the most to nail a starting point.
Nice test!
“You often feel tired, not because you've done too much, but because you've done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
― Alexander Den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know
A lighthouse seemed only fitting : ).
It seems to me that the dry mount makes the grain slightly more apparent as well. None of these are deal killers for dry mounting though I seem to recall from one of your tests that it made a more pronounced difference in black and white tonality. I'll try and corroborate that as well. This 1:1 stuff is really murder on my often less than disciplined shooting technique! The up side is I'm getting used to embarrassing myself. Wet mounting is new to me and these may be points that have been done to death, but the wet mount/DSLR capture method is somewhat new so bear with us.
Very interesting.
Thanks for posting this, it is very encouraging to see you getting so good results.
Keep up the good work
Ludvig
Thank you Ludvig, that's much appreciated. To go out on a limb as long as this, waiting many months to even know if it's viable, well, it's good to be able to say it looks worth the effort.
I've spent the entire day scanning with the machine, it's a bit addictive. I'm finally seeing so many of my images the way they I hoped they would look, without needing various software packages with lots of settings and hours of effort. Maybe one day I'll even post a really good image, I must have one somewhere.
I have had many images printed by ye olde high quality service bureaus and know what an image should look like, thus my frustration with the V700 (I have to stop bashing that thing, perhaps I'll just burn it's effigy and be done with it).
Ironic to be shooting good images of film digitally. My camera will probably see more action in here than out there.
Almost there...
“You often feel tired, not because you've done too much, but because you've done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
― Alexander Den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know
I just placed a BW negative on the light source. With the camera at Lo 1, F5.6 on the Micro Nikkor at 1:1, and the lights up full, an exposure at 1/60th of a second seemed about right.
“You often feel tired, not because you've done too much, but because you've done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
― Alexander Den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know
to the two recent designers:
what prompted the 'traveling light box' implementation?
It appears that Peter and Daniel attach the film to a "light box" and move this assembly beneath the camera.
just wondering if you had tried any other method before taking this common approach
Sure, my first version, the one that required manual movement, had a fixed light source. The main advantage of a fixed light source is that it can be smaller. The downside is that any unevenness is repeated with each capture. Could that be overcome? Sure.
“You often feel tired, not because you've done too much, but because you've done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
― Alexander Den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks