Can anyone share tips from their experience scanning 35mm negatives and slides? I'm interested in end-to-end: cleaning originals, scan res/depth/format, and storing the originals. I am scanning some very significant photos (~45 slides, ~60 negatives), so I'd like to do it right within reason.


Cleaning:
Is there a recommended way to remove fingerprints from negatives/slides?

Any problem with using a brand new microfiber mitt to remove dust from the originals?


Scanning:
I'm using an Epson Perfection V700 Photo, its film and slide trays, bundled software, 3200 dpi, 24 bit color, uncompressed TIFF. Its bundled software does a good job correcting color/exposure and automatically parsing negatives.

How can I deal with curled negatives, U shaped across their short edge. I'm worried about the scanner's fixed focus - that the height curl puts part of the image below it.

Is there a RAW format for scanners like in DSLR cameras? Or is TIFF flexible enough to let me play with colors/balance later?

The software has a dust/scratch deletion feature called ICE. Results are amazing and negatives really need it. Sometimes it overacts and sharpens edges all over the image. I use it sparingly. Any thoughts on image cleaning software?


Storing:
Is there a good way to store negatives and slides? I've seen the Print File 3 ring binder sleeves for negatives. But will their plastic bind to the negatives/slides, as mentioned in the CD storage thread?


Thanks. It's so good to see these classic family photos again.

I can give my take on this because I'm actually still a film user (Medium Format still beats digital..)



Never tried it myself but you could try these.



No as long as your are careful. Air (not canned the propellant can come out) probably works better though.



That can be a problem with Epson flatbeds. This company sells an ANR (Anti-Newton Ring) glass insert that works with the OEM 35mm holder. This would get rid of the curling problem and Netwon's rings at the same time.



Yes but the Epson software probably doesn't allow you to write it. Vuescan does however, if your not using Vuescan I suggest you spend the $50 to buy it. Very good software.



ICE works by scanning the film in infrared, with color films anything that shows up as infrared is dust or fingerprints. This allows the software to detect these imperfections and correct them. After your done scanning the only way to clean the images is with a clone brush. So it's best to use ICE when you can. If you are scanning B&W film you will find using ICE doesn't work. In that case you are down to the clone brush again.



Not if you get the archival kind.

Interesting! I had to look up Newton's Rings.

Ooh. I'd seen that. Didn't know what it was called. The whole "discovered by Hooke, named for Newton" drops a bunch of the Baroque Cycle into focus as well...

Wow, good information. Looks like I'll be digging out the negatives again once I get the glass insert. Makes me wish I had more negatives/slides to scan.

If I orient my negatives as Epson recommends, they are bowed down toward the glass. I'd have to flip them, against the recommendation, to use the glass. It's worth a try though, especially for those 11x17mm negatives which were so hard to mount.

Vuescan sounds good. The bundled SilverFast was one of the most confusing Windows programs I have ever used. Astoundingly baffling.

Thanks for the info on ICE. I was wondering why it scanned everything twice. I'd rather use a wipe/liquid to clean them, but I'll have to test it on some less important images. They were SO dusty, though I couldn't see any of it with my unaided eye.

3 gigs of scans for 85 images. That's half the size of my total digital photo (JPEG) output in 8 years, 5500 pictures. Ha, just wait till I start shooting RAW with my Rebel.

Thanks again.

Well if you want more film to scan you can always start shooting film. My 6x7cm slides that I take now end up scanning into a 150MB Tiff file. You may not get the instant results, but the quality blows my DRebel out of the water.

Oh and I always scan with the film curling towards the top, this way the film holder can more effectively flatten the negative.

Hasselblad makes a medium-format digital camera. Quite cheap, too.

Wow that is very cheap. I will get the home equity loan started right away <sic>.

With all the power of a medium format camera, I'd feel obligated to take only the best photos. Anything less would be a waste of film and an insult to the machine.

Even with my new Rebel, I use it sparingly. But with my little Canon A650 and the S50 before that, I capture anything and everything, multiple times even.

Medium format + scanning is tempting. It's great to zoom in on a picture and just continue to see more and more detail instead of pixels.

Medium format sounds fun, but it's just a pain. You can't take your slides / negatives most places to be processed. Traditional film scanners don't handle the larger format. Just everything in your life gets more complicated.

If you value your time, then you go digital. If you want insane high resolution, then pony up for a Canon 1Ds Mark II along with the good lenses and sturdy tripod and all that.

That is the conventional wisdom- but it still can make sense to use film for some shots, especially if you already have a scanner that can handle it. Consider that a 1Ds costs $7000 and a roll of 120/slide costs about $9 with processing. That's 777 rolls of film. Sure the 1Ds makes sense for commercial photog's and people who want to take massive quantities of pictures but for the serious amateur it's hard to justify the price. It does take some time to scan, but not anymore than going through the 200 bad shots you took with your digital on the last outing...

Is there some magical feature of medium format that prevents you from taking bad shots?

Assuming not, digital gives you the ability to not worry about taking bad shots. Is it worth that much more? Dunno.

Or maybe you're making the argument that a medium-format camera is a relatively inexpensive solution for those who need super-high resolution photos only every once in a while and can deal with the worry of wasting film because they're only going to take a few pictures with it anyway.

But that ignores the fact that a medium-format body is still going to cost you at least $800 new (cheapest MF body with non-fixed lenses on B&H), plus the cost of lenses, which won't fit other cameras and which start at like $400 each.

I'm saying Medium Format is good for shots were quality matters more than quantity.

New Medium format isn't cheap but used prices are very good. You can get a used MF SLR with a good lens for about ~$300.

This isn't the path for everyone of course, it is much easier to shoot away with an automagic digital. I personally enjoy the physical process of taking images that I can see without a computer, and the quality is great too.

And there's certainly something to be said for the art of photography itself. When each photo requires a certain amount of manual labor to process after the fact, you become a better photographer more quickly because you're no longer just randomly shooting and culling out the bad shots.

Selecting the "good" photos out of a shooting session was, once upon a time, only a small part of the art of photography. These days with digital cameras and huge amounts of storage, it's quickly becoming the biggest part of the process.

I'll argue that going digital is amazingly valuable toward improving your skills relative to using film. Back in high school, I was the head newspaper and yearbook photographer. I shot, developed, and printed an awful lot of film. I learned a lot about photography, but I felt that going digital really took things to another level for myself.

When you go digital, you can take advantage of instant, immediate feedback that's just not available with film. Most notably, you can leverage the histogram feature to recognize when the automatic metering blew it and you can compensate in the field. Contrast that with the old-school technique of shot bracketing (and burning a whole lot of film). Likewise, you can shoot so many more variants on a shot, giving you a better chance of getting good results. Two hours of careful darkroom work maps to about five minutes of Photoshop tweaking. Digital is just a huge win all around, particularly if you assign a dollar value to your time.

If I was going to go back and shoot film, it would have to be large format view camera. That gives you sharp resolution and perspective control you'll never get with a digital camera any time in the immediate future (or, at least, at a price point you could afford).

Oh, agreed. But you learned the hard way first, on film. Someone who's starting out on digital and has never had to sweat won't have some of the discipline you've got.

Discipline? Mostly just pain. Trying to make somebody learn photography through using film is kinda like making them learn how to write software with BASIC on an Apple //e. Hey, it worked for us. What's the matter with you? Kids these days, don't appreciate how hard we had it back in the day.

The single piece of advice I give people is to just shoot an awful lot of pictures, since the marginal cost of taking a digital picture is zero. The more you shoot, the more you can develop a critical eye with your own work.

I believe an even better wording would be, delete a lot of pictures.

Yes, definitely.

When I lived in Germany I was involved in the rebuilding of a friend's 200 year old fisherman's cottage. One of my hats on the job was as photo-documentarian. I've got 1500 negatives to scan. This project has been on the back burner for, oh, nearly 20 years, now. Perhaps technology has finally gotten to the point of removing the tedium and automating much of the effort in digitizing negatives and slides. My friends have been waiting patiently on me for a long, long time!

At first, years ago, I was planning to go through all the negatives and order prints, then the digital era arrived and I made some poor attempts at scanning them with an HP scanner. In either case the work was daunting and satisfactory results were hard won.
Things have moved along in the modern world and today I ran across this Fry's ad for a no-name slide and negative scanner. That piqued my curiosity about the whole thing again and so I cruised Amazon looking for public opinion. I found this CanoScan 8800F for a little more money and this this scanner, which is similar to the one from Fry's, but has some reviews (there is a Pandigital scanner available from Fry's as well, but no reviews). I looked over at NewEgg.com and found only a couple reviews of similar negative scanners.

I'd really like to be able to get through this project in an intense weekend. It seems to me that the 'camera' style scanners are much quicker than the true scanners.

Anyone have experience with any of these types of scanners?
Your recommendations are greatly appreciated.

Slide scanners are going to do a better job scanning slides than a flatbed scanner with a slide adapter. Usually the dpi is much higher, but, more importantly, it actually designed to deal with slides. For example, flatbed scanners expect the media to be flat on the glass, but a slide will hold the film away from the glass by a millimeter or so. Higher-end slide scanners also have the ability to detect scratches and dust by also scanning non-visible wavelengths, which can be handy when retouching.

I don't know anything about specific models any more. This is all based on research I did a few years ago when I had a project very similar to yours, which, also similar to yours, I haven't gotten around to yet.

LOL

Yeah. Even if you could somehow manage an average of 2 minutes a scan, which seems highly optimistic, that's over 48 hours non-stop.

Maybe if you had multiple trays so you could load one while the other was scanning, the scanning was automated so that a whole tray could be scanned without interaction, and nothing went wrong.

Also remember that if you're automating this, you aren't going to be doing interactive touchups, so you need to hang onto all of the data and not lossily compress the images. Assuming a 2700dpi slide scanner, 35mm slides, and 24bpp, that's basically 28MB of uncompressed image data per slide. If your scanner supports it, you'll want to record more than 24bpp of data, especially if it does a scratch-and-dust scan, but there will probably be some lossless compression involved, too. Still, though, that's a total size of about 40GB for your whole library. (Which, now that I do the math, isn't so big these days.)

Ha!
My initial estimate was 500 negatives, but then I thought about how many rolls I went through... and updated the number but failed to update my timescale.
=facepalm=

Thanks for that estimate, Bitt. I hadn't even given a thought to the space requirement.

Even if it were 500, you're looking at a much larger job than you think.

This has been discussed here on the BBS before by others who were saddled with similar responsibilities. While new hardware and software can improve things somewhat, it's still a huge job regardless of how good your tools are.

Doing the job properly: Carefully cleaning each slide, checking each image to make sure it was scanned with the best possible quality, color correcting (something that will require user intervention for every photo because each one will be faded a different amount), and making sure that the automatic software corrections didn't accidentally ruin a given photo...

A job like this, to be done properly, is measured in months, not days.

le sigh

You can trade time for money. There are several professional scanning services. For slides, you just send them your selects, of course. For negatives, they don't want you to cut the strips. One popular option is ScanCafe. They do all the cleanup and send you back nice, high-res scans, suitable for dumping into your favorite photo processing tool.

(I'm considering shelling out some big bucks and sending them my binders of b&w negatives from high school. Not cheap, but then I'd at least have all that old work accessible to me again.)

Damn straight. I have been dabbling in large-format for a few years now, using a mid-fifties Graplex Crown Graphic 4x5 press camera. I develop the film in a Jobo ATL1000 automated film processor, which is a brilliant device that takes out most of the really hard bit, and drives the costs down a hell of a lot.

However, scanning the resulting slides/negatives (if you're used to 35mm a 4x5 neg is REALLY impressive ) is a very slow process. Using my V700 at maximum 6400 DPI 16 bit resolution takes over 20 minutes per image, and setting up the negative can easily take as long. Invariably there is some dust you didn't notice on the first pass, and you have to do it again. And again. And again.

I've spent upwards of an entire afternoon just getting one good scan. That's before you fiddle around with it digitally. And the size of the file is ridiculous. 4 x 5 inches at 6400 DPI gives a 25600 x 32000 image (819.2 MP!). In 16 bit B&W that's nearly one and a half GB per image. A colour image is three times the size.
Of course, scanning most film at that resolution is pointless as it's far beyond the resolution of the original lens, and in many cases beyond the resolution of the film grain. At a more sensible 3200DPI you end up with 390MB images, which are still pretty large for most photo editing software.

Luckily I don't take a lot of LF pictures

Medium format image are still pretty damn big. Even 6x4.5cm, the smallest 120 film size, ends up as raw files around 40MB in size @ 3200DPI, or 120MB in colour which is what I mainly use for MF. They eat up disk space really fast. 35mm images are much more reasonable, but a couple of thousand of them still needs a large drive.

That said, at least in MF and especially in LF, the image quality is so far beyond any currently reasonable digital camera that it's truly amazing. I have played with £75k digital cameras that give MF a real run for it's money, but I can't really justify an imaging system that costs nearly as much as my house

The film is surprisingly inexpensive and still easily available, and the cost of the cameras secondhand if anything is going up. All the studios dumped it in favour of digital, and put all this lovely gear in the hands of amateurs who could never have afforded it before. As a result larger formats of film have had a real resurgence over the last few years.

That said, scanning 1500 slides would be a job I certainly wouldn't want. It would take a long, LONG time.

pca

Years ago, Fuji built a 6x8cm (or was it 6x9cm) medium-format body with a lens on a bellows giving you all the movements of a large-format view camera. Somebody needs to shrink that all down and do it for a 35mm-sized sensor. (Current tilt/shift lenses seem kludgy in comparison, never mind scandalously expensive.)