DSLR Film Scanning

[GRAYnomad]

Rob: Curious what "stitching software" you're using...

I've been using PTgui for about 17 years. Back then stitched panos were pretty new and the few other options available were useless. There are many more options now, in fact pano stitching is built in to most programs like ON1, PS etc. But there is one big difference between them and PTgui. That is that with PTgui you can manually apply control points, it's not normally required but for example if you have a photo with a lot of fuzzy water, or other areas with no real detail, I find that most programs struggle to lock onto what parts of each image should match. PTgui can struggle with this as well, but with it you just go in and create a few control points manually to give it a hand.

PTgui also allows a lot of control over the image placement, rotation of the pano, fixing of panos that point up or down and also format of the output. For example you can output to a layered PSD file where each image is on it's own layer with a mask. Thus if there are some funnies you can get in there and tweak things.

https://www.ptgui.com/

Oh, and the gotcha I mentioned above? If scanning roll film DON'T include the lettering on the edges. The pano software (all 3 I tried) sees "PORTRA" in one place and two frames away sees another "PORTRA" and thinks that they are matching parts of separate frames, the results are interesting if not that useful I was tearing my hair out about this and with the other two programs I could do nothing about it as there was no information supplied. Then I looked at the control points automatically produced in PTgui and saw dozens of them clustered around these letters and numbers and realised the problem.

This pic shows a heap of good control points on the rocks but some up on the lettering as well.



This actual example would be OK because they are adjoining frames, I couldn't find an example of a bad match, but you get the idea.

All that said it does seem to be a problem with using RAW files as much as the lettering, so I just convert them to TIFF and either don't shoot the lettering or crop it out before feeding the images into PTgui.

YMMV, but I would give it a try...I just had a look at their site, it costs US$154 these days, yikes. Panos (normal ones) are a big thing with me so I don't mind spending a few $, but that's a lot. Still, it's cheaper than buying a scanner


EDIT: The other programs I use are Affinity, ON1 and PS and to be honest they work just fine most of the time and you probably already own one of them. If not buy Affinity.

[roscoetuff-Skip Mersereau]

Rob: Thanks for all of that. Let me ask a follow up if I may. Are you using stitching to do panos (I think), or stitching to put together small sections of a DSLR scanned negative into one "scan" of the negative? The latter is more what I think I'm headed towards, and I can see how both processes are very similar. And frankly I'd hoped for an automated means of doing so. But now you make it clear that manual is probably better. Oh well.

[Peter De Smidt]

Well, you can have an automated way of doing it. If you have a precision movement system, then you can use a template (I hope this is the right word) to stitch perfectly in PTgui.

Otherwise, Lightroom can created a stitched pano raw file, which is terrific, if it can handle the stitching.

[grat]

Affinity is pretty good at automated stitching.

[GRAYnomad]

R...Are you using stitching to do panos (I think), or stitching to put together small sections of a DSLR scanned negative into one "scan" of the negative?...

Until last week I only used if for proper panos, but now I'm using it for these multiple DSLR scanned pics of negatives as well.

As for automating, If you are a wiz with embedded processors and stepper motors yes you could automate the process, I could, but I doubt it would be worth the trouble. One thing I plan to do is add indexing to the light table and neg carrier such that I can just slide the carrier along to align index marks and not have to view through the camera. It already only takes 10-20 seconds, but this will be easier.

NOTE: I just redid the stitching of a few negs with Affinity, it worked very well but if it does eventually stumble on a neg you have no control, so I would probably just use Affinity (or PS or LR or ON1) until there is a problem (if ever). If you don't already have Affinity it's worth a look as your main editor, I still have an old PS copy for a few things but hardly ever use it. That said I'm liking the ColourPerfect plugin I have on trial so if I buy that I'll need to keep my PS around just for the neg/pos conversion (I wish people would make programs stand-alone and not reliant on another program).

[grat]

There is *some* control over pano stitching in Affinity-- Once you load the images, and hit "Stitch", it opens in a new window, and I (usually) hit "Apply". But, if you use the icons to the left, you can do some alterations to the pano before the final render.

See https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lp...ng%20panoramas for more information.

[martiansea]

If you don't already have Affinity it's worth a look as your main editor, I still have an old PS copy for a few things but hardly ever use it. That said I'm liking the ColourPerfect plugin I have on trial so if I buy that I'll need to keep my PS around just for the neg/pos conversion (I wish people would make programs stand-alone and not reliant on another program).

I agree. I recently dumped all my Adobe apps in favor of the Affinity suite and DXO PhotoLab. Affinity handles all the "painterly" editing, compositing, adjusting, collaging, chopping, mutilating, ruining, coloring, etc... that I used to do with PS, and DXO PhotoLab is simply the best raw file processor/developer I've ever used. I tried all the ones I could find and nothing beat PhotoLab for sharpness and detail and noise reduction. Affinity's raw processing is decent, but wasn't even as good as CameraRAW (at least on Windows, I hear it's better in the Mac version).

I've gotten hooked on DSLR scanning, myself. Did this comparison between my Nikon D800 with Minolta 100mm AutoBellows Rokkor (using a plain lens mount adapter with no correction glass) and the Imacon FlexTite I got to use in grad school. The results were more than enough to convince me this is a good way to go. Never got results this good with any flatbed I tried.

This is a crop from a 35mm negative.
Upcoming DIY project is to build a permanent light source with mask that allows for easily making consistent pano shots of the larger formats. I had tried getting the whole negative in one shot, but the results were disappointing. 1:1 of the 35mm frame really looks the best.

[PatrickMarq]

I am crap with colour I admit, probably why most of my film work was B&W

Put new layer below the scan layer and combine them using the "subtract" option (some other options seemed to do the same as well).
[*]Adjust brightness etc. Colour should be OK but also need some work..

Be sure that the new layers has 80% transparent with the substraat.
as I’m also using Affinity , you can use the alt key with levels if you change first the white point to 1% . A strange bug ...

[GRAYnomad]

Be sure that the new layers has 80% transparent with the substraat.
as I’m also using Affinity , you can use the alt key with levels if you change first the white point to 1% . A strange bug ...

Thanks Patrick, I'll try that with the next one.

[GRAYnomad]

I agree. I recently dumped all my Adobe apps in favor of the Affinity suite and DXO PhotoLab. Affinity handles all the "painterly" editing, compositing, adjusting, collaging, chopping, mutilating, ruining, coloring, etc... that I used to do with PS, and DXO PhotoLab is simply the best raw file processor/developer I've ever used. I tried all the ones I could find and nothing beat PhotoLab for sharpness and detail and noise reduction. Affinity's raw processing is decent, but wasn't even as good as CameraRAW (at least on Windows, I hear it's better in the Mac version).

I've gotten hooked on DSLR scanning, myself. Did this comparison between my Nikon D800 with Minolta 100mm AutoBellows Rokkor (using a plain lens mount adapter with no correction glass) and the Imacon FlexTite I got to use in grad school. The results were more than enough to convince me this is a good way to go. Never got results this good with any flatbed I tried.

This is a crop from a 35mm negative.
Upcoming DIY project is to build a permanent light source with mask that allows for easily making consistent pano shots of the larger formats. I had tried getting the whole negative in one shot, but the results were disappointing. 1:1 of the 35mm frame really looks the best.

Looks good. I wouldn't like to be a scanner manufacturer these days

Have you got any comparison images of exactly the same area?