Article on digitalizing film with a digital camera, including color negatives

https://photopxl.com/digitizing-nega...IGTZVAKoQr1J0o

Hmm, I'm not very interested in scanning my film that way, but I am intrigued by his comment that True Vue Museum glass prevents newton rings. If this is true for enlargers as well, it would be a much cheaper option for negative holders. Wholesale, Museum glass costs $16 per 16x20 sheet, meaning an 8x10" piece would cost only $4, much less than the $200 I found proper anti newton glass for. Granted to get a 16x20 sheet you have to buy 16 of them for $255, which is more than a single sheet of ANR glass, but for applications such as large contact printing frames this could be great. Museum Glass does block UV though, with the fall off starting above 400nm, so it wouldn't work well for alt processes.
Attachment 223806
UltraVue might work for some processes sensitive to higher range UV though, it still has a good amount of transmission just below 400nm, and also has anti reflective coatings like Museum glass.
Attachment 223807
I wonder if there are any anti reflective glasses that don't also have the anti UV layer museum and ultra vue glass have? Or maybe the UV layer could be stripped off somehow. Museum glass only shows a UV coating on one side, perhaps that side can be stripped while leaving the anti reflective coatings on the other. I'm not sure if the other coatings also block some UV though.

Fascinating deep dive on the subject. Given the article's level of exactitude and refinement I'm going to have to give Negative Lab Pro a spin. He's obviously done his homework.

I wonder how difficult it'd be to DIY a ZigAlign tool.

It's nice to see a proponent of DSLR scanning going at it fervently and in such a well informed manner. Tons of useful info there.

I read the article as well, I think the parts about getting the getting the negative flat and perpendicular to the camera axis is great. I don't use Negative Lab Pro, but rather ColorNeg which has some great profiles for different film emulsions and while it's got lots of adjustments, it sometimes can get there without any.
Also I wonder why the author does not use the multi-shot function? This is one area it really makes a difference.

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Originally Posted by Peter De Smidt

https://photopxl.com/digitizing-nega...IGTZVAKoQr1J0o

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Thanks Peter, I downloaded and printed this article as I think we may move in this direction as my lab still does a lot of scanning, currently I have a Flextight but I am not sure how long support is on this unit, as well a Creo Supreme which does have support.

but I am kind of thinking a big ass mirrorless camera system with a custom built light source and neg station may indeed be a way to go for a lot of our scanning needs.

Assuming imperfect contact, reducing reflection and/or increasing scatter are the ways of suppressing Newton ring formation. Typical ANR glass goes the second route. The challenge in that case has always been to maximize scatter without degrading image quality and/or having the etched surface pattern show up in the print (or scan). In the darkroom, historically some of these glasses did work reasonably well, however when it comes to high resolution photography of negatives/positives (ie the camera way of digitizing which is gaining in popularity), most ANR glass is probably too coarse/grainy. Some finer grained solutions are currently being marketed. Alternatively one can try to reduce reflection as much as possible, using optical thin film coatings such as those used on camera filters and taking lenses. I have had some success with this route over the years - although it tends to be expensive. I’ve tried various things. One was BBAR multicoated filter glass/optical flats I got from Schneider. The other experiments were with several types of framing glass - first Denglas, and then several types of Tru-Vue glass (they sent me 8x10” samples of each type). Since I don’t do alt processes I wasn’t concerned with UV transmission (in fact when it comes to standard silver gelatin darkroom printing you’re better off filtering out as much UV as possible).

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Originally Posted by Ethan

Hmm, I'm not very interested in scanning my film that way, but I am intrigued by his comment that True Vue Museum glass prevents newton rings. If this is true for enlargers as well, it would be a much cheaper option for negative holders. Wholesale, Museum glass costs $16 per 16x20 sheet, meaning an 8x10" piece would cost only $4, much less than the $200 I found proper anti newton glass for. Granted to get a 16x20 sheet you have to buy 16 of them for $255, which is more than a single sheet of ANR glass, but for applications such as large contact printing frames this could be great. Museum Glass does block UV though, with the fall off starting above 400nm, so it wouldn't work well for alt processes.
Attachment 223806
UltraVue might work for some processes sensitive to higher range UV though, it still has a good amount of transmission just below 400nm, and also has anti reflective coatings like Museum glass.
Attachment 223807
I wonder if there are any anti reflective glasses that don't also have the anti UV layer museum and ultra vue glass have? Or maybe the UV layer could be stripped off somehow. Museum glass only shows a UV coating on one side, perhaps that side can be stripped while leaving the anti reflective coatings on the other. I'm not sure if the other coatings also block some UV though.

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Quite a few years ago now I went through a phase of trying to use Tru-Vue AR coated glass for contact printing. The problem was that it was very difficult to get large-enough pieces that were blemish-free, and after a while the routine of annoying the staff at the pro frame shop, looking for pieces that were sufficiently clean to meet the needs of my application rather than theirs, became more trouble than it was worth. Maybe I was just unlucky or had unreasonable standards; maybe the production process for coated glass has improved since then. But at least back then, it was a lot easier to get a pristine large piece of high-quality, non-coated glass than coated glass.

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Originally Posted by bob carnie

Thanks Peter, I downloaded and printed this article as I think we may move in this direction as my lab still does a lot of scanning, currently I have a Flextight but I am not sure how long support is on this unit, as well a Creo Supreme which does have support.

but I am kind of thinking a big ass mirrorless camera system with a custom built light source and neg station may indeed be a way to go for a lot of our scanning needs.

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Yeah, once a camera system is developed and setup properly, scanning becomes very fast, much faster than using a pro flatbed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Peter De Smidt

Yeah, once a camera system is developed and setup properly, scanning becomes very fast, much faster than using a pro flatbed.

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You are right , this is one of the keys for me, my life has come a bit full circle , I started in the 70's and now I am working on projects from this timeline, there is less and less need for me to enlarger print this work (basically I charge too much money) but with the digital negs to silver I am getting lots of projects.Attachment 223833 This show is currently one of my bigger projects of 2021, to date I have made over 100 prints that the gallery has sold, She has 40 000 negatives and there is about 4 more shows planned so this quick option like the phase one system has some merit to me. I have compared the phase one system to Flextight and Creo Eversmart and to my eyes they are quite equal. To the pixel sniffers maybe not but I sell prints and I think they are really cool. The jpeg is from Todays Toronto Life Magazine which is one of the more popular mags in Toronto.

Great stuff, Bob!