Digitizing that film
May 25th, 2007Now I didn’t get back into film photography just so I could scan the negatives and then print the image just like any digital photo. I figure if the image is good enough to put up onto the web, you may as well spend a bit of effort in the darkroom and make a print yourself. At least then I can scan in the final result and keep the post processing to a minimum. At least this is the reasoning that I’ve used to keep myself from blowing my cash on a film scanner.
Of course given that I don’t even have a fully functional dark room right now, this means that I don’t get to post anything unless I get the images scanned in at the 1 hour photo place when they are developed (which wont work with my B&W stuff since I am developing that myself). This costs money, and the results aren’t exactly something to write home about. So I thought, why not use my DSLR, I have flashes and I have close up filters. A proper macro lens would be nice, but with the close up filters I could get the lens close enough to fill most of the image with a single 35mm frame. Here is a brief run-down of the experiment.
I took a Tupperware container that I placed upside down over some white cardboard, placing my flash to the right pointing directly to the side of the container. This would provide a relatively diffuse light source.
At first I placed the film on a piece of paper on top of this container, but the fibres of the paper were immediately obvious in the resulting photos. So I scrapped the paper idea, and put two piles of books on either side of the Tupperware, putting the film on top of these, held down with some light objects that I hoped wouldn’t damage the surrounding frames (in this case a CD and my lens cap). This kept the plane of focus far enough away from the container below so that none of its surface texture could be seen.
I took a few shots at various apertures until I had some options to work with in Photoshop. These were shot in RAW as I would need the added bit depth.
It took a bit of playing around in PS to get things right. Just converting the negative image and then inverting it results in terrible results, the colours were off, the contrast almost non existent. So how do we get a better image?
The first thing to do is make sure that the white balance is set correctly. The problem with colour negatives, is that they have a very strong orange colour cast. So the first thing you do is take the white point selection tool in RAW converter, and select the blank film around the picture. This is the white of the negative image.
Now select the highlights option (this will show the blown highlights as red) and increase the exposure until you have as much of the film around the picture red without any of the picture itself over exposed. Reduce brightness to 0, and increase the shadow slider until the negative image looks about right. This will take practice, but after a few tries you will get a feeling for it. Now you can open the converted RAW file in PS.
Once you have your negative image in PC, go to the Image->Adjustments menu and select Invert. This will turn the image in to a positive image. The resulting image should be pretty close to what you want. I found simply using Photoshop’s auto color option did the final touches to the image to make it decent. In no way do I think you’re going to get a quality image that you could print from out of this, but the result is definitely okay for posting your holiday snaps for your friends to view. Improving the lighting consistency across the frame, and a true macro lens might result in images worth of enlargements and art prints, but I don’t have the time or the desire to test that right now.
The image I used for this test was from a batch that I had gotten processed and scanned in at one of our local 1 hour labs. The resulting scan from that lab was horribly saturated and sharpened so much that there was no chance of getting any decent enlargements out of it. Given that it doubled the cost of processing the film, I just don’t feel it was worth it. The canon shot that I did with this quick setup had much more faithful colours, and due to less sharpening had way fewer artefacts in the image. With a proper macro lens I would have been able to achieve close to the camera’s full 8 megapixels, and even with just my close up filters, I was able to achieve an increase in size over the 2.2 megapixel scans. The thumbnails below link to web sized versions of the photo, as well a 100% crop comparison.
