What are the film scanner options in 2017?

[Pere Casals]

...have you tried any kind of multi exposure with the DSLR?

I'm also thinking that some kind of multiexposure would be useful with the D800.

It looks that Velvia (DMax) slide dynamic range does not fit in the around 14 bits per channel the D800 can deliver. White the D800 top of the trees is near clipping while the shadows have slight less shadow detail than with drum.

It would be interesting taking a D800 shot in with exposure for the shadows under trees an another one ideal for the top of the trees, this would determine if ME can help.


Well, that D800 scan is not any bad, still not as good as the drum but it shows an surprisingly interesting potential, at least to me.

[Rich14]

Rich, You are correct that Tango is emphasizing reds. I didn't have a matching target to calibrate the scanner so slight variation is to be expected. I usually make minor corrections after the scan so that colors feel true to the scanned image.

Have you done any color negative tests with your DSLR setup? I am hoping to have something to proof my scans before drum scanning and my Epson just doesn't do the originals much justice.

Pali

Yes. Scanning negatives is easier with the camera and ACR software than any other method I have ever used. The values of B&W or color negs can be inverted in ACR and controlled completely. Far better than scanning software.

I bring the resulting positive image into Photoshop, sample the mask which is now blue, then create a fill layer above the image, fill it with the mask color and set that layer to Divide. That properly removes the mask where it exists in the image. The mask is just that. It's not an overlay and exists from deep mid-tones through the shadows/blacks. Then I do final color correction.

Rich

[Peter De Smidt]

I'm also thinking that some kind of multiexposure would be useful with the D800.

It looks that Velvia (DMax) slide dynamic range does not fit in the around 14 bits per channel the D800 can deliver. White the D800 top of the trees is near clipping while the shadows have slight less shadow detail than with drum.

This is from a long time ago now, but it shows using HDR techniques with a dslr film scan: http://peterdesmidt.com/blog/?p=657

The question is whether that would help. It looks like the shadows are completely captured, i.e. the histogram extremes, at least on the shadow side, seem captured by the D800e scan, what's gone is the variation in the dark areas that the Tango captures. Look at the shadowed forest floor, for comparison. This could be due to processing, or a loss of shadow detail due to flare, or, as Pere suggests, simple lack of dynamic range, i.e. the shadows fall on the toe of the camera's response curve. Regarding processing, I would avoid all use of clarity, structure,.....,in raw processing. The negative needs to be very well masked for stray light, the room should be dark, and no bright surfaces should be able to affect the image. The lens needs to be very clean, and the interior of extension tubes, bellows.....should be checked for any shiny surfaces. (This is often a problem with macro photography. The serious macro people often put light absorbing baffles inside extension tubes.) My guess is that flare is causing the most significant loss of shadow detail in this case.

DSLR scans are, in my experience, better suited for scanning negatives than for scanning underexposed Velvia.

[Rich14]

It would require a special equipment to move DSLR precisely in parallel with film plane as well as spending time on stitching and dealing with vignetting \ uneven illumination on edges of each frame, overlap errors, etc.
The Velvia reproduction examples from DSLR so far don't look smooth (somewhat lose the appeal of film usage if you will).

It doesn't require special equipment. If it did, no enlargement ever made could be called critically sharp. I carefully set the camera and film plane parallel with a digital bubble level. It's quite easy to do. You have both scans to compare, as well as the Eversmart. Where in the D800 scan is there evidence that the image was not optically aligned?

Taking four images takes a few seconds and stitching them in Photoshop takes about a minute, depending on your computer. The whole scanning process is just minutes compared to a comparable-sized scan on a drum scanner of 15 minutes - 1 hr.. (About 15 minutes at 2000 ppi. My process gives about 2600 ppi. To get that on a drum should be done at 4000 ppi and subsampled down. That would take 60 minutes.).

There is no unevenness of illumination in obtaining the four quadrant scans. The LED light table is absolutely even in brightness across its area. The film ins not moved on the light table. The whole tablet is repositioned. There are no overlap errors.

You are making up problems that don't exist.

My scan may not look as "smooth" as the Tango scan. This could lead us to a very long discussion of the optical path of Tango scanners and that scanner's ability to set it's aperture to the optimum for the highest resolution scans. Tangos scan at a higher aperture than Howtek machines. At 2000 ppi the Howtek automatically selects a 8u aperture size i believe (at 4000 it's smaller - I may have these values slightly wrong) The Tango uses an aperture no smaller than 10-12u, smoothing detail somewhat. This topic has been beaten to death over the years. It's a design decision Heidelberg made and stayed with. At typical magazine page reproduction size (the target market for which the Tango was intended) the smoothed (not less sharp) appearance was the goal. There is no equivalent aperture/scan spot size situation with the camera scan. But it's obtaining it's image at the equivalent of setting a scanner's aperture to minimum.

My scan may look a little more grainy or gritty. I may have overdone my capture sharpening by a small amount (10-15%). Maybe not. I'm used to bringing the image in sufficiently capture sharpened to go on to a large final print size. I print a lot at 20"x30". The image may look a little over sharpened on the screen, but it is correct at this point before output sharpening for the large print. I'll reprocess the RAW file with less capture sharpening and post that later.

We are looking at the finest detail that's in this Velvia shot. (Even though we are "only" looking at about 2000 ppi here (higher scan resolution would have revealed no more). Understand, the area that we're looking at in these crops was so dense that on the light table it visually is just featureless black. It takes a bright light and a loupe to see this image detail. We're almost seeing film "grain" and some film noise in the D800 scan, which is what you get when digging detail out of dark, underexposed film. There is no false image data. there are no halos. Compare the tiniest detail that you can see in the Tango scan to the D800. The latter shows that detail more distinctly everywhere, without any "extra"cruft.

I have done many D800 rescans of images that I have done or acquired over the last 30 years from my drum scanners and from others. I have been in the commercial printing business for a very long time and I have drum scanner files going back into the 1980s. Some from machines that never were available outside the industry) I have the magazine reproductions that we printed then. And I started printing digitally in the early 90s on IRIS machines, then Epson equipment from the late 90s to today. Every single rescan that I have done on the D800e has been an improvement of the original drum scan, whatever its origin. In many cases astoundingly so. The D800 shows micro-contrast, brilliance, tonal transitions and image detail that the older scans just didn't capture. And they were done by very good equipment operators.

I've replaced some of the pictures that were hanging in my home and my wife has remarked how "bright and clear" the new images look compared to the old ones and that she "can easily see things in the pictures she had never noticed before."

I wish you all could personally see the Velvia transparency Pali and I have imaged here (I hope others volunteer to scan it). Even though it is very underexposed, like most transparencies, the image has sparkle and "life" that you can see visually with transmitted light that is an enormous challenge to bring through in a scan. In my opinion, the D800 scan captures this significantly better than the drum scan.

Rich

[faberryman]

I'm not so sure. The bottom one looks a little "cleaner."

I think the cleanness you are referring to is caused by significantly higher contrast. Compare the shadow detail of the forest floor in the lower left quadrant of the images for example.

[Rich14]

This is from a long time ago now, but it shows using HDR techniques with a dslr film scan: http://peterdesmidt.com/blog/?p=657

The question is whether that would help. It looks like the shadows are completely captured, i.e. the histogram extremes, at least on the shadow side, seem captured by the D800e scan, what's gone is the variation in the dark areas that the Tango captures. Look at the shadowed forest floor, for comparison. This could be due to processing, or a loss of shadow detail due to flare, or, as Pere suggests, simple lack of dynamic range, i.e. the shadows fall on the toe of the camera's response curve. Regarding processing, I would avoid all use of clarity, structure,.....,in raw processing. The negative needs to be very well masked for stray light, the room should be dark, and no bright surfaces should be able to affect the image. The lens needs to be very clean, and the interior of extension tubes, bellows.....should be checked for any shiny surfaces. (This is often a problem with macro photography. The serious macro people often put light absorbing baffles inside extension tubes.) My guess is that flare is causing the most significant loss of shadow detail in this case.

DSLR scans are, in my experience, better suited for scanning negatives than for scanning underexposed Velvia.

I believe the D800 scan is aquitting itself very, very well.

I'm getting the sense that there is a lot of negativism just based on the feeling that, "this just can't be.' This method can't equal a drum scanner."

Luddism, anyone?

Seriously, I think all the suggestions about improving the conditions of the D800 scan are well taken. And I think we need to discuss all this. But I also think the remarkable qualities of this D800 scan are being ignored.

I didn't do an additional shadow exposure and run an "HDR" process to capture more deep shadow detail, but I could have. Sorry, but I thought I was obtaining all the shadow detail there was. It would have been easy enough to do. Two exposures for each quadrant. That would have doubled the time to acquire the image, but still, far less time than for a drum scan.

Pali, want to send the film back to me? :-)

I have done everything I can currently do to reduce flare. Oil mounting the film helped (of course). I am not using any extension tubes. I can't reduce flare in my Micro Nikkor 105 any more than its internal structure allows. I believe my lens was as clean as I can get it. My room was quite dim. The only light was from the light table and the 4x5 was completely masked by a cardboard aperture. There was no stray light other than that from the image itself.

Drum scanners are incredibly robust and sophisticated, complicated pieces of equipment, developed by teams and engineers and built in factory conditions with machining capabilities of incredible accuracy. They are refined and refined and refined before they are released.

I'm using a cobbled-together, jury-rigged set up, mounting my camera on a tripod, set up on my dining room table and shooting from a cheap LED tablet. The whole rickety setup vibrates and oscillates. I can see every micro vibration on the live view screen dance the image all over the place. I use mirror lockup, hold my breath for 10-15 seconds and gently trip the shutter with an electronic cable release which I carefully make sure is not itself touching anything. - And I'm still getting sharper, more detailed images than come through on the drum scan. It's as simple as that, folks.

I don't agree that capture sharpening shouldn't be done in ACR during the RAW processing stage, but I will post another crop with capture sharpening reduced to default levels.

Rich

[Peter De Smidt]

I didn't say anything about capture sharpening. I have over 5 years experience doing dslr scans. I wouldn't have put the effort I did into if I didn't think it was a viable option, which isn't the same thing as saying that it's the absolute best in all (or even any!) circumstances. Why the defensiveness?

[Rich14]

I didn't say anything about capture sharpening. I have over 5 years experience doing dslr scans. I wouldn't have put the effort I did into if I didn't think it was a viable option, which isn't the same thing as saying that it's the absolute best in all (or even any!) circumstances. Why the defensiveness?

Peter,

Sorry. I was replying to a combination of messages. If I came off as defensive, I did not mean to. I hope to be able to present data here in an objective way.

Rich

[Rich14]

Reprocessed D800E oil mount, Panorama 5 RAW image quadrants. No capture sharpening. No Levels or Curves adjustment to lift shadows. No post processing sharpening.

[faberryman]

Reprocessed D800E oil mount, Panorama 5 RAW image quadrants. No capture sharpening. No Levels or Curves adjustment to lift shadows. No post processing sharpening.

IMHO, the color, contrast, and shadow detail looks better in the Tango scan.