Who in our USA does a good job scanning color negative 4x5 film and can get good colors?
Who's the best? And, who does a good job for a reasonable price?
Is drum scanning necessary to obtain a high quality scan?
Who in our USA does a good job scanning color negative 4x5 film and can get good colors?
Who's the best? And, who does a good job for a reasonable price?
Is drum scanning necessary to obtain a high quality scan?
There is an alternative to your question —
have prints made [say size A3] from the negatives first, then home scan the photos …??
scanner being A3. therefore the bypass of the scanning of the negatives.
Please note, it is more difficult for drum scans of negatives due to the orange film base tint.
just an idea …
Unless you're making optical RA4 prints, or have that done (at considerable cost!) in a lab, printing a color negative these days virtually always involves first scanning it. Given this, it would be kind of odd to first have a lab scan it and print it, and then scan the print again.
Concerning the drum scan remark - since people have been successfully drum scanning C41 film for decades, I don't think it's much of a problem. At least it can be worked around. Besides, the same would be true for any other kind of scan; the orange mask is inherent to the film, after all. A scan from a flatbed will also have to be inverted and corrected for the mask. The only difference is that the scanner software may hide this part of the process from the user. It still happens.
@neil - your last question about a high quality scan: how do you define 'high quality'? What's e.g. your resolution or maximum print size requirement?
From a flatbed, expect roughly a 2000dpi real world resolution limit on a decent scanner (Epson V600 / V800). Practically, that means you can get a good (~360dpi) 20x25" print from a 4x5 from a consumer-level flatbed scan.
I used to have optical prints done from color negatives (6x7) and then have them scanned at a commercial printer for catalogues & brochures (they used a high end flatbed). It worked well. A photo editor at a magazine suggested it to me.
I would also do my own B&W prints & scan them. It worked better at the time, as the consumer scanners (mid 90's) were not as good as the current V800.
I'm a former drum scanner operator. I've drum scanned a ton of color negatives and did not find it either difficult nor time consuming. What I did find, is that scanning color negatives gave me higher quality scans than scanning color positives. This might have been due to the intrinsically better color accuracy compared to color positives; IDK. At least some of it was due to the photographers I scanned for; if they matched the dynamic range of the scene they photographed to the limited optical density range of the color positive film then scanning color positives was also easy.
As a photographer myself, I only used 4x5 negatives, both color and B&W, almost entirely Kodak TMY2, and Portra 400. Both scanned easily and gave beautiful results. Just sayin'.
Bruce Watson
Flickr Home Page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/albums
That's the reason that I want to send this 4x5 color negative to a service. Hopefully, they can get the color right. I was thinking of sending a Type C photograph that I printed long ago of the negative. It shows the colors that I want.
I'd like to go as high as a 32"x40" print, which I calculate to about a 120MP file. Is that possible, even with FlexTight technology?
Thanks for all the input.
I'm not familiar with FLextight. But my Epson V850 set at 2400bpi and 48 bit color provides a 520MB tiff file at 10959 x 8455 bit resolution for a 4x5" chrome. That's 36" x 28" at 300 bit per inch printing.
I've not tried printing my scans. Maybe someone else has and give some of their results regarding printing quality of the Epson.
Flickr Home Page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/albums
My old ColorGetter 3 Pro did a good job with the analyzing and removing the orange color correction masking. It's a combination of scanner firmware and the ColorRight Pro 2.0 software for the ancient MAC that it requires (runs under MacOS 9.2 IIRC). This scanner was designed to be a "generalist" and can handle color negatives, color positives, and B&W negatives all quite well. Other drum scanners were aimed at the magazine pre-press market (aka advertising) where WYSIWYG was more of a requirement, so were optimized for trannies.
Properly set up, ColorGetters can get the colors very close, to the point where the occasional small touchup with Photoshop was a piece o' cake. That said, it got colors on trannies close too -- but all trannies need some touchup in my experience, because they *lack* that color correction mask. But if they had it, they wouldn't be trannies. Kodak's dilemma: correct color vs. WYSIWYG. Both have their places, they solve different problems.
I should point out that just about all color films, positive or negative, will need some correction during printing. For one thing, the films are expecting to be exposed at a given color temperature, and hardly anyone ever sees the exact correct conditions when out in the field. For another thing, I try to separate out the color correction step from the color grading step (movie industry term). Color correction gets you to the starting gate. Color grading is where the artist manipulates the image to support the mood or help support the story the artist wants the image to tell. I tried to end my participation at color corrections. I never want to get in the way of an artist telling the story they want to tell, the way they want to tell it.
So I wouldn't advise anyone to worry too much about getting exact color during scanning. Get close enough where making the final decisions is easy, and that's about the best you can do.
Bruce Watson
Thanks. Is this still being sold? I'm interested.
For now, I want to go with a pro shop. But once I get a new computer, I would like to find software that can effectively deal with the orange mask. For example, I can't get ColorNeg now, because my computer's too old.
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