Let's talk about table top film "scanning." It's not really that complicated...

Ben. From a Kodachrome shot. About 24 years ago.

Making good, clean "scans" (digital copy shots of negatives -- translation for the archly literal...) is so much easier than I thought it would be. Someone asked me to talk about tips and tricks but the truth is that there are so few secrets to getting good "scans" that I don't have much to convey. I'll just let you know how I've been doing it and maybe you can improve upon my technique if you've found a better way. I will say that my "weak spot" is with color negative film. It's trickier than slides or black and white negatives.

Here's my very basic rig:

Capture captured with a tilt to the camera because, well, as Garry Winogrand might have said,

"What tilt?"

This is my basic rig for "scanning" black and white negatives. At the bottom of stack, under the film holder, is the Negative Film Supply light source. It's a very bright, high CRI, LED light source that shines through good, white diffusion material. The negative holder sits on top. I also have a medium format negative holder by the same company and it came with masks for 645, 6x6 and 6x7cm. The light source and negative holders are sitting on the baseboard of a very basic and inexpensive copy stand. 

As you can see I have a Panasonic S5 (the original) camera with a Sigma 70mm Art Macro lens attached to the copy stand. That's the whole system. That's it. Oh, two more accessories:  a bubble level to make sure the film plane and the camera's film plane are parallel to each other and, a Rocket Blower to blow off dust from the negatives. In the old days I would have defaulted to "canned" air but I'm trying to do my part to save the planet. 

Most of my scanning is aimed at black and white because that's what I spent most of my free time shooting. The bulk of my color stuff is from commercial jobs and I'm not so motivated to go back and scan most of that work. Since it's all from black and white I try to keep things as simple as possible. 

I set the camera to daylight balance (the little "sun" icon) and set the camera to shoot raw. I use aperture priority mode. I set the aperture to f8.0. I let the camera and lens autofocus for me. I only bracket the color stuff. I set the camera to shoot in the multi-shot or high-res mode where the camera takes multiple shots of the images and moves the sensor slightly between each exposure and then blends all the shots together to make a very high resolution file. It's not a gimmick. It actually works. You can test it yourself.

Usually I just make one from for each negative. Then I import the file into PhotoShop. The very first step I make, before doing any sort of corrections is to go into the "Image" menu and scroll down to "Adjustments." In adjustments I go to "Invert" and click it. This inverts the image from a negative to a positive. The image at this point looks really flat. Almost milky. Since I always include the film edge in the scan it's easy enough to go into "Levels" and select the shadow eyedropper and click on the film edge to select a solid black. Then I use the levels slider to slide the highlight slider to the left until the highlights look good and then I fine tune the mid-tones. 

Once these steps are done I can go to "Filters" and scroll down the menu to hit "Camera Raw Filter" which brings up all the image controls I would normally use to tweak files in a normal workflow. You'll find all the color and exposure controls plus the new blur tools and color grading controls. At this point everything is subjective. The images almost always need a big bump of contrast and I have no trepidation about giving the slider a yank to the right. 

The final step for me is using the "Healing Brush" to spot out all the dust spots that escaped my previous ministrations. Dust is the bane of negative scans. Just as it was the bane of traditional enlarger printing. 

And, just like that, you've finished making a black and white file from your favorite negative. Like magic. 

Experiment at first with overexposing your "scan" by one stop and underexposing by one stop and evaluating which works best when doing the inversion. 

Color transparencies are even easier. There is no inversion step to mess with, the contrast correction is much less severe and the colors are generally WYSIWYG. If you want perfection you might want to do a custom white balance for the light source and use that instead of the sun symbol. It might make some feel more in control. 

After you scan your negatives they go back into the sleeves so the real world doesn't cause them to deteriorate. 

More about color negatives....if I ever master them. There is software available but I'm either too cheap or too stubborn to buy it right now. If I find a lot of color negatives that need to be scanned I'll probably change my mind. And I'll write about the software when I do. 

Nothing else big to report today. Just re-reading Jack Kerouac's "Dharma Bums" novel again. It feels different from when I read it in college forty some years ago. Maybe the publisher changed it. Maybe I changed. 

One more note: I have used a number of scanners over the years with which to scan film. Those include: The Nikon LS-4000, the Nikon LS-4500, the Epson V-700 and the Epson Perfection 3200. Some worked very well but were very slow. Some worked less well but were quicker. And, every time I sent film out to be scanned by a lab I regretted the lost of iterative control. Just saying.