Anyone have much experience scanning in their own film negatives? I’ve played with scanning negatives and slides a couple times, evaluated SilverFast vs VueScan etc, but never really committed to it, always having lab scans as my backup/main copy.
I just sent 3 rolls of film off to Memphis Film Lab to ONLY develop and send the negatives back, not scan - so it’s time for me to brute force my way through mastering this.
The current methods I plan to compare:
~$200 Kodak film scanner
Epson V600 flatbed scanner
45MP raw via my Canon R5 C
Minolta DiMAGE 3200 film scanner
I might also be picking up a PrimeFilm XE film scanner locally to throw in. I also want to test the claims I’ve seen that it’s actually better to use your phone screen blasting white light instead of a dedicated LED panel (for camera scanning method) due to the phone supposedly providing “full spectrum light” instead of just white, which… I find dubious, but worth investigating.
I have the frames and LED panel for camera scanning, but I haven’t acquired a good mounting thing yet for the perfect right angle.
I will be testing both what produces the best quality (which is most likely the camera scanning) but also what will provide the best value of quality for effort, diminishing returns, etc.
Many good things have been said about these old film scanners, but I’m not quite sure if I expect them to hold up.
I don’t have a lot of experience, but picked up a Plustek scanner and have been pretty happy with it. I also use Negative Lab Pro (Lightroom Classic plugin) to process the negatives. Really happy with the image quality. It’s pretty overwhelming to actually realize how many variables there are! It’s not like there’s one objective way to process the negatives.
Fun stuff, I don’t shoot a ton of film but I enjoy it!
Yeah the negative processing is something I have MINIMAL experience. I think I bought a copy of Negative Lab Pro or whatever when I last messed with it, but I’m going to have to hunt it down.
I’m excited to hear more from people who are happy with the quality of proper film scanners; YouTube stuff makes it seem like camera scanning is the only way and it’s just going to be so cumbersome. My Minolta DiMAGE just got here, excited to play with it
Yeah I’m truly a baby noob when it comes to anything film, I’ve literally shot maybe 8 rolls in my entire adult life (I got a cheap Canon FT QL, from the 60’s, which was kinda busted but sent it off to a repair person who did incredible work and it’s like new, and the thing is built like a tank, almost all metal) - then I got sick of paying all the lab fees and only getting mediocre JPGs, so picked up the Plustek. It’s a bit tedious - load 6 frames in a tray, puff air at them (gotta admit one of those good air puffers makes a huge difference!), scan one at a time…it’s slow. But some of the camera scanning setups I’ve seen look even more obnoxious.
Hi EposVox! I have a Plustek OpticFilm 8200i Ai that I’ve used to scan my negatives as well as family slides.
I can’t recommend enough the (specifically, because apparently the 8300 has some issues) 8200i Ai.
For family image archival, since I had hundreds of slides to go through, I used its “QuickScan” utility set to 24-bit color depth, 3600 ppi, and Auto Crop turned on, still enabling the Preview so I can double check frame detection, as well as tweak brightness and contrast if it was a badly exposed original picture with the Prescan before running the full scan. It automatically numbers sequentially. Took me on average 50 minutes to get through a box of 72 slides.
For my own film photography, scanning my negatives: I use SilverFast 9…Studio? Whichever trim level lets you batch scan and use the 8200i AI’s infrared camera to do some easy dust and scratch removal using the SilverFast iSRD feature. My settings for SilverFast are:
48-bit color depth, which creates a TIFF
NegaFix for my film stock or closest match
iSRD with sensitivity 8
Increase to full in Preferences the iSRD match offset distance
For each Prescan, Ctrl-F to auto frame
Clicking Batch Scan brings up a window that you use to briefly verify the file name and sequential numbering, then you click OK
On average, 3m10s per frame because 48-bit visual scan takes longer, as well as the additional iSRD scan
I personally don’t think I’ll ever use a brush because I’m paranoid of permanent scratches and when there’s still dust after blowing and using iSRD I can just good old fashioned clone tool