Need feedback for building DSLR scanner

[rdeloe]

I can tell you what I would not recommend... I had a large sheet of telescope flocking material (adhesive on the back). I thought that would make a good mask, especially for stray light bouncing around. It's a poor choice. First, it's not dense enough to block all the light. Second, and more important, the flocking material does come loose and thus creates another source of crap that lands on your negative and has to be removed during spotting.

The template I'm using is a thick piece of wood, so I just spray painted it matte black. That blocks all the light except what I want.

What material do you recommend for creating a mask around the film to block light? I assume it needs to be something soft/weak enough to cut with a blade, yet heavy enough and sturdy to stay flat and hold the negative down.

[Greg]

Here's what I use: For shooting 35mm and 120 negs: Nikon Multiphot with a Nikon D850 mounted on it. 120mm Macro-NIKKOR. Light source is either the collolated Multiphot's light source or a small 4x5 Aristo (cold) light source or sometimes double expose with a combination of the 2 light sources. For shooting 4x5 and larger switch over to using a copy stand. 65mm or 120mm Macro-NIKKOR (from the Multiphot) on a modified old rigid Leica bellows unit. Light source is an oversized LED "lightbox". I align everything up using a home build "aligner". Most important thing is to mask the edges of the film. I see people just placing their film on the lightbox without masking it. Tried that once and had a flare problem along the edges. The Macro-NIKKORS were formulated for having very flat fields, and I have found that only stopping down one f/stop from their maximum aperture to be the optimum aperture for my application. Always shoot RAW. To mask the sheet film, I use weighted down old sheets of the black paper that was interleaved with sheet film.

[Peter De Smidt]

There are black plastic sheets that work well. I got some from Amazon, and I'll hunt down link....here it is: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[Greg]

There are black plastic sheets that work well. I got some from Amazon, and I'll hunt down link....here it is: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Thanks for posting that URL. Totally forgot that maybe 15 years ago when I was photographing a collection of hundreds of glass plates for a museum used a similar but thinner product. Went to our local framing shop that had a computerized matt cutter. Had them cut out 4x5, 5x7, and 8x10 openings to place the glass plates in. Now to see if I can find out where I "filed" them. Certainly easier and better than my current masking setup.

[Ted Baker]

The LED lights I'm looking at have an option for 5000K or 6500K color balance, I'm going to go with 5000K, thoughts?

I would go with a 5K source, simply because it closer to the correct light source for viewing transparency with the human eye. IMHO it not correct that the light source needs to have a high CRI for scanning. What is correct is that combined effect of the light source and spectral sensitivity of the sensor is correct for the task at hand. Strictly speaking it does not have to exact, just accurate enough that errors can in fact be corrected. A light source like used in Coolscans is actually three separate colours (i.e. RGB leds) and is not a High CRI light source. Color negative and Positive have different requirements, the former is not intended be viewed by the human eye.