Negative film - exposure or scanning?

[polyglot]

If the files you have are clipped, there's nothing you can do to get the info back out of them. You need the raw 16-bit files in order to do burning.

If you want to get a feel for a particular film, shoot it like you would a chrome and try to capture only a small dynamic range. You should then get a good straight scan. Capturing larger dynamic ranges is possible but not compatible with handing the scanning off to someone else to get back an auto-levels file. See if you can get them to send you the 16-bit raw scan data; if not then you must scan for yourself or accept the narrower dynamic range.

I terms of which scanner to use, drum scanners are far better than a V750 but the scans will cost you 10x as much. I'd only bother with a drum scan specifically for making a very large print. Drum scans while you're getting the feel for a film are a huge waste of cash.

[oysteroid]

I use an Epson V750. I have found that none of the scanning packages really do a good job with automatic settings. By far the best results I have obtained when scanning negative film were when I scanned it as a positive with no adjustments whatsoever, no clipping, no profiles, basically asking the software to just give me the closest thing possible to a raw, linear scan, and then using ColorPerfect in Photoshop, using its profile for the film, to invert it and adjust the color a bit. I can't believe how much more natural the color and tonality looks, most especially with Ektar, which has weird color when processed in the scanning software, even with a good profile. And I seem to get more dynamic range this way. There really does seem to be something in the better math that ColorPerfect supposedly uses. I can't do anything comparable using SilverFast, EpsonScan, Vuescan, or inverting and adjusting myself in Photoshop. So if you have someone else scan it for you, you might ask them to scan as positive with no adjustments whatsoever, giving you a 16 bit TIF, and then use ColorPerfect yourself to invert and correct it. ColorPerfect has a horrible interface, one of the most poorly designed interfaces I have ever seen, but the math under the hood does surprising things. Maybe later, I'll post a comparison so that you can see what I am talking about.

It also helps to scan the image at higher than the desired resolution, as high as possible, even though the V750 does not resolve any additional detail at those higher settings because of its less than perfect optics or whatever. The reason is that the scanner itself introduces noise. And by scanning at a higher resolution, you are effectively oversampling, and when you later downsample the image to the realistic detail limit of the scanner, something like 2000 to 2400 ppi, you have an image that is far less noisy than if you had scanned it at your desired final resolution. A less noisy image sharpens up much better, helping to compensate for softness of the scan. The files are huge though when you scan at 4800 or 6400 ppi. You need a beefy machine to work with them. I usually just scan at 4800ppi, then immediately resample at 2400 ppi or so, delete the huge 4800ppi file, and then adjust from there. I don't see any difference when sharpening the 4800ppi file before downsampling versus sharpening after, and waiting to make any adjustments makes things go much faster!

[oysteroid]

I must make a correction to my last post. When I scan as positive for later inversion in ColorPerfect, I do use a profile for the scanner, but that's basically it. I turn everything else off. Here is a comparison between a Portra 400 negative handled that way, with ColorPerfect doing the inversion, and the same negative handled by the latest version of SilverFast Ai, allowing it to do the inversion, pulling as much range as I can out of it. The first one looks dramatically more natural to my eye. It is a little flat and could perhaps use some adjustment, but it represents the scene pretty accurately, at least as I see it on my monitor. The SilverFast version has something wrong with it that I wouldn't even know how to begin addressing in PS. This was my second exposure ever with LF, by the way. It isn't the most wonderful scene, being mostly a test.

[Meekyman]

Thanks everyone for your input. I clearly have a lot to learn about scanning! Sure, this was just a test to see how the negatives came out...I wouldn't want to pay for a drum scan of such test images. I'll see if I can get hold of the raw 16-bit files from the scanning company and think seriously about how I'd digitize and print my images if I stick with large format in the long run.

I can imagine lots of long nights and banging my head on the desk in the future!

Cheers

Graham

[oysteroid]

Meekyman, don't ask them for a raw file, as scanners don't produce those. Ask them to scan as positive with no adjustments and no clipping, just a plain, linear, 16 bit per channel TIF. Here is some more info:

http://www.colorneg.com/scanning_sli..._linear_scans/

Keep in mind though that you will have to purchase ColorPerfect to do things this way ($67), and you must already have Photoshop. If you don't plan to get ColorPerfect, then don't get them to scan as positive, since trying to invert the image and get a decent result in Photoshop or GIMP alone is next to impossible. It isn't a matter of simply inverting the image.

If you want scans cheaper than drum scans, you can get Imacon scans at AgX imaging for $12.50. He calls it a Hasselblad drum scan, but that is very deceptive. That scanner is marketed as a virtual drum scanner. It isn't a real drum scanner. And for 4x5, the resolution is limited to 1800ppi, which isn't so hot. I haven't tried those scans myself.

If you already have a DSLR, with a good macro lens and proper stage and lighting setup, you can "scan" them yourself at fairly high resolutions by stitching multiple macro shots of the film together. I suspect that it is possible to get better results than a V750 that way if you have the right gear and technique, though it is a bit cumbersome and will take a LOT of fiddling and engineering to figure out how to do well. I haven't done it myself.

For large format, the best bet is to just buy yourself a decent flatbed like the V750, use it when you don't need the resolution for very large prints, and when you need the absolute highest quality, pay for a drum scan. Just realize that the scanners like the V750 sound better than they actually are. The claimed resolution figures are ridiculously inflated. The best you can do in reality with these scanners is about 2000ppi of real image information. And the film holders that come with them are cheap, flimsy garbage. Epson should be embarrassed. And expect some dust and haze on the underside of the glass where you can't clean without making matters worse. It is the best you can do for less than a thousand dollars. And even the V750, with its claimed 4.0 Dmax, can't dig far into the shadows of Velvia 50. You lose some of the dynamic range of an already unforgiving, super-contrasty film. It is fine for Kodak's negative film however.

And be ready for seemingly endless sessions of cloning out dust and scratches, no matter how careful and clean you are in your process.

You'll come to realize, maybe too late like I did, that the idea of large format film being able to capture all of that information is great in principle, but it is no use if you can't get it into digital form, unless you plan to do your printing the wet way, in the darkroom, with a 4x5 enlarger, in which case you'll have a huge investment there with everything involved. Getting a good scan is just about as much of a problem as taking the picture in the first place. And you simply CANNOT get a scan that allows you to get all the information your camera is capable of capturing using equipment that is available to a casual, not-so-rich hobbyist photographer! The ONLY way I know of to get all that you are dreaming of out of that camera is to get drum scans, and they cost more than a $100 a pop!

To really get the resolution that most people come to LF for, you need a good solid camera and tripod, excellent lenses, flawless technique and understanding of all the factors involved, no wind, optimal shooting conditions, a very expensive scanner or VERY, VERY expensive drum scans, an expensive computer to process the images on, and very expensive prints to show all that detail.

Before you get more invested, you've got to ask yourself if you really plan to make big prints. Have you seen what it costs to have a large print made and framed?

Really, you need to be on the road to doing this professionally, unless you are loaded and can just play with very expensive toys for the hell of it.

And on top of all that, you are getting invested right at the moment when the future of film is doubtful. I sincerely hope I can get quality color film and processing for another year or two, and I don't feel secure about even that. I bet black and white will be possible for some time to come, but not color of any reasonable quality.

With all that I have invested in LF, I find that my camera just sits there. The conditions have to be so perfect to take good shots with it (conditions that tend to evaporate while I am composing, focusing, metering, calculating), and it is so bulky, that I just rarely use it. And nobody wants me to take their picture with it, as getting everything set up just right wears down their patience. And then despite my instructions, they tend to move while I am putting my film holder in, ruining my careful focusing and defeating the whole point of LF.

I wish I hadn't sold my digital gear to get it. I used my DSLR much more and got much more out of it. And nowadays, a DSLR can nearly match the resolution of a 4x5 negative scanned with an Imacon at 1800ppi. See the Nikon D800. Is nearly $3000 a lot of money? How many drum scans is that? Boxes of film? Processing? Scanners? Chiropractor bills?

And once you get all invested in 4x5, you'll realize that you should have just gotten an 8x10 in the first place anyway! As long as you are messing with a big camera and everything associated with one, you might as well be using an 8x10. Sure, the film costs more per sheet to buy and develop, but how much does a drum scan cost? Print? Gasoline to drive to that perfect spot just to expose one or two sheets during the fleeting time of ideal light? The cost of the film is the small part!

But with 8x10, you can't scan it properly with a V750. And your computer will probably choke on 16bit per channel 4000dpi scans of 8x10 film! And you will definitely have to own a 64 bit version of Photoshop and a lot of RAM to be able to handle a large image like that! A full 8x10 inches scanned at 4000 ppi and 16 bits per channel yields a TIF that is roughly 7.2 GIGABYTES! YES! Watch your state of the art PC sit there seemingly frozen while you wait for it to just rotate the damned image 90 degrees!

If you are selling enough prints to be able to afford drum scans, you can probably justify a medium format digital back that will get you nearly the same resolution and a lot more convenience and power.

Realize also that most of the photographs that sell are not huge prints anyway.

Yes, large format photographs, done well, printed large, beat small format digital photographs. They have certain qualities that are hard to put your finger on, aside from sheer resolution. And they don't have that awful bayer interpolation and the accompanying AA filter nonsense that softens your images at the pixel level so that you have to sharpen excessively to get the crispness back, at which point you have introduced haloing everywhere and lost the depth, solidity, and roundness of the forms in your images as a result. Oh wait, the digital scanning process (not drum) does that too!

And scanners are not being developed much anymore. Those that exist now might be irreplaceable soon.

And if you don't care about all that resolution and whatnot and want to make softer, arty images, just make a pinhole camera or use plastic lenses. And since you don't have much resolution, scan the film on a $200 scanner. It will do just fine. Or get one of those toy plastic cameras with 120 film and have someone with a Nikon Coolscan 9000 scan it for you until all of those die out. Or just use an iPhone and the latest Hipstamatic app.

Or better yet, learn to paint. Gallery shoppers are more into paintings than photography anyway, and pay much higher prices for them. And paint will be around for a long time. You won't have to worry about Kodak's bankruptcy. And painting is even more romantic than LF photography! Can't paint? You can learn. It isn't as magical as people think it is.

And being able to paint is rarer and thus more valued. Everyone these days takes photographs and so nobody really values them or knows how to tell the difference between really good photographs and that kitschy stuff your cousin does with her digital Rebel. Our world today is absolutely saturated with photography. Most of it is viewed on little LCD screens. And nobody who isn't a photography geek understands or wants to hear about the virtues of LF film photographs.

But if you still want to pursue LF photography after all that, you must have the right spirit for it, so go for it! You might just love it!

[cps]

Meekyman,

To respond directly to your original question: Your metering technique for negative film is probably fine. The DR of negative film is pretty enormous, and the simple rule of metering shadows and letting highlights fall where they may generally works for me - particularly with Portra 160 (I truly love this film). Your approach should work.

If you are getting clipped highlights in the files you got from the scanning company, then it is almost certainly due to their processing. The Epson 750 generally has no problem pulling highlight information out of negatives (Kodak has already done the hard work of mapping the tones to a scannable range), but the operator actually has to do something to get the right result. The Epson software, for example, defaults to substantial highlight and shadow clipping if left to its own devices. Very crunchy, and totally unusable files. But, it is not a hardware issue, just sort of dumb software defaults. Moving about four sliders in the software takes about 30 seconds and eliminates most of this problem, but someone actually has to DO it. What you got sounds pretty typical of what I have received from my color film processing provider.

Don't get spooked by all the technical detail. The first 4x5 negs I scanned on my 750 blew me away with detail and DR captured compared to anything I had shot with before. I just used the Epson software, fiddled a bit with the curve tool in the different color channels and let it do the inversion for me. Still beat anything I ever got from a digital camera hands down. The color I get is something I have never been able to get out of a Bayer array camera, and to me at least, the way fine detail breaks into noise on a negative is just much more pleasing to look at than the awkward way digital files break up - even quickly scanned files from my 750 have this advantage. Drum scanners do quite a bit better - I do have one, so I know. Spending lots of time refining your scanning workflow and software will let you do better too. But that's not where to start if you just want to get a fair sense of what is on the negative. Start by asking your scanning provider to give you files that aren't clipped. If they don't know what you are talking about, then move on. It's just not rocket science.

People have all sorts of reasons for getting into LF. It's not always to create 40x50 prints for some gallery (that in my case wouldn't want my photography anyway). For me, one reason I dipped my toes here was the "look" of LF. For example, portraits that give you the shallow DOF of a 150mm or 210mm focal length, but with a huge field of view. Very difficult to get that effect on a small camera with an imaging area the size of your thumbnail.

Good luck with your LF adventure!

Chris

[Lenny Eiger]

The ONLY way I know of to get all that you are dreaming of out of that camera is to get drum scans, and they cost more than a $100 a pop!

To really get the resolution that most people come to LF for, you need a good solid camera and tripod, excellent lenses, flawless technique and understanding of all the factors involved, no wind, optimal shooting conditions, a very expensive scanner or VERY, VERY expensive drum scans, an expensive computer to process the images on, and very expensive prints to show all that detail.

Oyster,

You seem to have had a bit of a rough time. There are one or two things I would add to your list of concerns.

First of all, drum scans may not be for every image. For one of those $100+ scans you mention I spend over an hour on expensive machines getting the result. I'm not getting rich on this, just inching along covering the expense of a scanner like this by supplying scans for others as well. I appreciate the scans as they come out sharp to begin with, and much cleaner than the CCD scans. I have many customers that scan images on a 750 or something similar to edit the ones they will ultimately send to me. Some want to simply get every thing that can come off a piece of film and the best technology currently is the drum scanner.

There is another option for meekyman. Right now an Epson 750 is around $800-900. Howtek 4500's are regularly sold for around $1500. That's not a lot extra for a huge upgrade in quality. It takes a little to learn to mount without bubbles, but not as much as learning to load med format film on a stainless steel reel without getting crimp marks.

Finally, large format is addictive. and much more fun than painting. ;-)

Lenny

[oysteroid]

Lenny,

I don't mean to put you on the defensive. I understand that given your investment in equipment, the expertise required, and your valuable time, you have to charge this kind of fee to make it worth your while. I should make it clear that I don't think you or anyone else who is offering this service are overcharging. I am just trying to make sure someone just getting into this understands that it is one thing to get 4000ppi of quality information on film, but to get it onto a print involves a lot of expense and know-how, more than most people getting into this usually realize. He needs to have a clear view of what he is getting into. And he needs to understand that scanners like the V750, which are already pretty expensive for a hobbyist, WILL NOT give you a digital image that contains all the quality image information that the camera is capable of putting on film. The only way to get somewhere close is with a drum scan, which is very expensive, and justifiably so, but very expensive nonetheless. And he needs to be asking himself if he thinks he might want to eventually spend that kind of money on each image.

The thing you quickly learn in photography is that passable image quality is easy to come by and relatively affordable. Excellent image quality costs A LOT, both in terms of money and time and effort investment, no matter what system you use to get it. There are no shortcuts to it, digital or analog. And large format film photography isn't a magic shortcut, despite the fact that quality LF gear is cheaper than ever. Yes, that image on the ground glass can put a twinkle in your eye and raise your dopamine levels, but then there are meat-hook realities to deal with if you intend to actually make a semi-permanent image that you can share with others. How serious are you? All newcomers to this must have a clear sense of what is actually involved.

[Lenny Eiger]

Lenny,
I don't mean to put you on the defensive. I understand that given your investment in equipment, the expertise required, and your valuable time, you have to charge this kind of fee to make it worth your while. I should make it clear that I don't think you or anyone else who is offering this service are overcharging.

Thanks for your concern.... its appreciated.

The thing you quickly learn in photography is that passable image quality is easy to come by and relatively affordable. Excellent image quality costs A LOT, both in terms of money and time and effort investment, no matter what system you use to get it. There are no shortcuts to it, digital or analog. And large format film photography isn't a magic shortcut, despite the fact that quality LF gear is cheaper than ever. Yes, that image on the ground glass can put a twinkle in your eye and raise your dopamine levels, but then there are meat-hook realities to deal with if you intend to actually make a semi-permanent image that you can share with others. How serious are you? All newcomers to this must have a clear sense of what is actually involved.

I would agree with this. Photography has always been expensive. Even darkroom paper is very pricey these days. It took a lot of trial and error to learn the ins and outs of color profiling and black and white printing. I might have gotten into it a little early. There was certainly a lot of time that went by and a lot of expensive paper and ink in the trash.

Photography is addicting. And its expensive to do it well, there's no doubt.

I think the one good thing about LF cameras and film is that no matter how much a hobbyist spends on a nice wooden folding camera and good lens, it won't cost as much as a high end digital back that will be obsolete in 3 years or so.

Lenny

[Richard Kenward]

Dear Lenny

I think you make a good point raising the depreciation issue associated with large format digital capture. There is of course the cost of putting right one of these babies if you drop it or it goes wrong not to mention the risk of theft! I'm speaking as someone who in addition to running two Heidelberg PrimeScanners also runs a couple of the 8K Betterlight scan backs for the art copying side of the business.

There is something beautifully simply about shooting large format. Pop a few DD slides into your pocket, sling a large format camera over your shoulder on a decent tripod, add the odd filter and light meter and you have the potential to produce awe inspiring huge prints with fantastic detail when you want. Even if the shutter packs up on you, you can get by with a lens cap exposure. Depreciation almost zero! Then do yourself a favour and get one or two really good drum scans from your best pictures. Anyone who has not shot on 10x8 film should give it a go IMO.

Cheers, Richard Kenward (precision-drum-scanning.co.uk also artisan-digital-services.co.uk)