October 2014 - Digital Group - Equipment and Film Scanning

Meeting Notes March 2009 to 2018.
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spb
Posts: 146
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

October 2014 - Digital Group - Equipment and Film Scanning

Post by spb » Fri Oct 10, 2014 10:09 am

Welcome to new members and prospective new members for the 2014/15 season.

BEGINNERS
Beginners amongst you will find a lot of useful information in the notes of past digital group meetings. In particular October 2013 covered equipment recommended for digital imaging. Also the paper entitled Adobe Photographic Software - Pricing and Comparison should be helpful if you are unsure which software to use.

Photoshop Elements Tutorials - don't forget that concise notes of all eight tutorials can be found on the Digital Group page of the main APS website, where there is also a recipe for resolving colour management issues especially those concerning screen and print matching.

EQUIPMENT
I am writing this at my new sit-stand desk on which are two new monitors.

Sit-Stand Desk - I constructed the desk with an Aluforce Pro 270GT legs kit which can raise or lower the desk to a pre-determined height for sitting or standing. This is very beneficial for those who suffer from back problems, as I do. Complete sit-stand desks are also available from the Back In Action shop in Amersham.

Monitors - Having visited the Photography Show at the NEC earlier this year, I was blown away by the image quality of the NEC flat panels there but couldn't decide whether to buy one huge one, or two smaller ones. The decision was later taken out of my hands when Native Digital offered me two 24" NEC MultiSync PA242W's at a better-than-show sale price. Still very expensive but gorgeous. I will report on my experience with them, over time.

Photoshop works particularly well on dual monitors and I have employed this technique very successfully for more than a decade. The image can fill
one monitor and the palettes, toolbox etc can sit on the other. You do need a dual-output video card but these are very common and inexpensive these days for desktops. Solutions for laptops are possible but not so commonplace. When upgrading your screen you could keep the old one for the palettes and use the new one (calibrated with the club's ColorMunki, of course) for the image.

Photoshop Creative Cloud (£8.78 per month for Photoshop CC and Lightroom) - The prospect is that Adobe will provide incremental updates and features to your applications, however the new features added in the 12 months so far have been less than stellar. The only one of any interest to me would be Focus Masking whereby an area can be selected on the basis of it's lack of focus eg a blurred background. I have no hesitation in continuing to recommend Photoshop Elements (no subscription, perpetual licence)!

Photoshop Elements Ver 13 (£80 full, or £53 upgrade) - Just out, and featuring a Refine Selection Brush but little else of interest. I have no hesitation saying that any version of Photoshop Elements from Ver 9 (because that includes Content Aware Fill) onwards is fine unless you need to open Raw files from a recent camera, in which case a later version that supports the camera is necessary.

NEWS
Photokina 2014 - It has been observed that the market for inexpensive point-and-shoot compact cameras is now officially dead. They have been supplanted by mobile phone cameras. This means that camera makers will have to concentrate on larger sensor cameras and new features to maintain market share.

FILM SCANNING
A common retirement project is to scan all that film lingering under the bed in shoeboxes. But is it practical to scan hundreds or thousands of frames? I set out to find the facts;

Commercial Scanning - Services such as Mr Scan scan slides for 49p (38p in bulk) and negatives for 29p (22p in bulk). They scan to a good resolution with professional equipment and are well-reviewed. They would just get the job done in quick-time but of course the nagging doubt is whether you could do it yourself cheaper and better……….read on;

Home Scanning Hardware - Nikon and Canon had a reputation for good dedicated film scanners but ceased manufacture some time ago. They are still available second hand, but are in demand and you would have to pay around £1000 on eBay for an obsolescent Nikon 5000 Coolscan despite questionable support under the latest operating systems. Plustek continue to manufacture film scanners in the £200 to £350 range, Reflecta also make scanners in the mid-ground with promising specifications. There are many others of dubious quality at the very low end. Some scanners offer attachments such as slide hoppers and roll-film holders to automate large-scale projects. A pair of such Nikon attachments would be around £500 on eBay although there are reports of jamming issues.

Another approach is the flatbed scanner with film capability. Ideally it needs to have a resolution of 4,000 dpi or more. Epson make many scanners with this capability including the high-end Epson Perfection V700 (£450) Photo. But are they as good as a dedicated film scanner?

In conjunction with a friend, I have been able to scan a mix of negatives strips, cardboard mounted slides and glass mounted slides on a Nikon 5000 Coolscan and an Epson V700 flatbed. The resulting scans have been very good and surprisingly similar. However, along the way we have discovered many pitfalls that lie in wait;

Software - Nikons come with Nikon Scan and Epsons come with Epson Scan but interestingly, third party software such as Silverfast (from £40) and Vuescan (from £24) offer increased facilities, have an excellent reputation, and support a wide range of scanners both old and new. We used Nikon, Epson and Vuescan software.

Dust and Scratches - Both of our Nikon and Epson scanners feature Digital ICE (Image Correction and Enhancement) which involve a second infrared scan. Because dust and scratches don't pass infrared light, it's possible to identify these and subtract them from the image. The results were extremely impressive on some truly awful test film but there was a time penalty. One issue with ICE is that it doesn’t work with monochrome film or Kodachrome because both block infrared light. Some high-end scanners (eg Nikon 9000) have overcome this limitation but intruigingly, our Vuescan (and apparently Silverfast) software use the IR scan differently and I did get excellent results with Kodachrome on the Epson hardware. By comparison Epson Scan produced bad artifacts with the same hardware!

Cropping - Very surprisingly, none of the software was able to reliably identify the edges of the film frame. Some edges were visible, some frames were heavily cropped and some were murdered. Slides were better than strips of negs and variable gaps between frames from manual winders made this inconsistency even worse. Whilst some of the software enabled an adjustable safety margin to be cropped all around, manual cropping of many frames was necessary - a big problem for bulk scanning.

Exposure - Automatic exposure is offered by all of the software, but we found one big flaw. If the poor cropping caused the inclusion of a light or dark edge, this would dramatically affect the exposure - often requiring a manual re-scan for good results. If the film is consistently exposed, a manual exposure could be set and some software can be set to ignore edges when determining exposure.

Focussing - The dedicated film scanners such as the Nikon are auto-focus but the Epson flat-bed is fixed focus. The film holders include variable height wedges and after a little trial and error, we found that all frames were consistently focussed, even given a mix of film strips and mounted slides - including some in glass. High-end scanners offer means to flatten the film and this might well be necessary with larger formats.

Timing - With bulk film scanning, a few extra seconds (or minutes) per frame can add up to months or years of tedious work. The Nikon 5000 took 20 seconds per frame or 40 seconds with ICE. The Epson V700 took 40 seconds per frame or 140 seconds with ICE. This was for a 6Mpx scan. Larger or smaller scans would take different times with the Epson, but the Nikon timings are unaffected by resolution.

In theory the Nikon could be set up to scan a whole film, or the Epson 24 frames in strips, but the issues highlighted above, including cropping and exposure together with reviewing, tweaking and filing etc will increase the times exponentially.

Epson have just announced V800 and V850 flatbeds to replace the V700 and V750. These feature instantaneous LED lighting and will remove the repeated Lamp Warm Up delays which add further frustration to the whole process.

My Conclusions (backed-up by several members) - Unless you are of a very determined and focussed character, the practical issues of home-scanning hundreds or thousands of frames render this impractical to the point of madness. I would strongly recommend trialling a few online services and then, after some strong editing, send them all off for professional scanning. The whole point is to be able to get on with the creative job of putting the resultant images to good use!

Cheers, Steve Brabner

spb
Posts: 146
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

Re: October 2014 - Digital Group - Equipment and Film Scanni

Post by spb » Fri Oct 10, 2014 2:20 pm

Recieved from APS Member Peter Wardman......

Hi Steve
Thanks for sharing your experience last night. My own thoughts are similar: if you have thousands, commercial bulk scanning is the only way. However, I scanned around 600 colour negatives/slides a couple of years ago for a photo book, with excellent results and not too time-consuming. In fact, I did not find cropping frustrating and did a rough manual crop before saving for editing in PSE.
I can reinforce two points you made: first, choose a scanner with an infra-red channel that supports ICE for automatic dust/scratch removal. Second, use the excellent VueScan software.
Plustek are not the only affordable film scanners still on the market. I bought a Reflecta ]Proscan 7200 with similar specifications after reviews on a specialist website which now also mentions a newer Reflecta, a bit more expensive, the Proscan 10T.
I cannot recommend VueScan too highly, even for general scanning. It supports old flatbeds that manufacturers have long since stopped issuing drivers/software suitable for newer operating systems, and also has a iOS app that enables me to scan direct from my cheap HP all-in-one to my iPad as pdf or jpg, using wifi.
VueScan did a great job with 35-year old colour negative and Kodachrome/Fuji slides. I did try multiple passes to reduce noise with 400 ISO colour negs (presumably noise reduction is the square root of the number of scans) but it was not worth the extra time: film grain was still limiting.
Hope these comments are useful. Please feel free to add a link or copy to the forum report.
Cheers
Peter

spb
Posts: 146
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

Re: October 2014 - Digital Group - Equipment and Film Scanni

Post by spb » Fri Oct 10, 2014 2:23 pm

Received from APS Member Alastair McGhee, after he suggested photographing slides with a slide copying attachment on a DSLR....

Hi Steve,
Trannies work a treat. I can produce real sharp copies with good colour balance and saturation, sharpened and tweaked in RAW with a file size in the region of 86MB. I am now thinking about scanning monochrome and colour negs. I am trying to figure out how I can use one of the scanning software programmes to compensate for the colour cast. I will keep you posted and try to bring along samples of my experiments later in the month. I should declare that I use ChromaPro slide copier which I used for several years when turning out AVs of the Colour Group and A & H Group annual exhibitions for the RPS. It was fun digging the machine out of retirement!

Cheers, Alastair

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