Copying color negatives with a dslr: I have been copying slides successfully with my Canon 5DS R, particularly if I bracket my exposure and treat it a an HDR. It is my understanding...

cactuspic Loc: Dallas, TX

I have been copying slides successfully with my Canon 5DS R, particularly if I bracket my exposure and treat it a an HDR. It is my understanding that the orange mask is so strong that if you expose the negative properly, the resulting image would be extremely underexposed by the time you filtered out the orange cast.

My thought was to create a gell to put over my light to counteract the orange cast. To create the gell, I would image the color cast with a profiled camera, sample the cast in Photoshop, invert the color, then print the inverted color on a clear medium in a size large enough to gell my light. Has anyone gone down this path? Any suggestions?

BebuLamar

No need for gel. You can white balance on the orange cast and make it looks white. Any parts of the image must be darker than the unexposed orange film.

cactuspic Loc: Dallas, TX

BebuLamar wrote:

No need for gel. You can white balance on the orange cast and make it looks white. Any parts of the image must be darker than the unexposed orange film.

Babu, from what I have read, the underexposure is substantial and lifting the exposure in post introduces a great deal of noise. Also, the shadows may be too dim to lift, particularly if there is any orange in them. But I have not tried it yet. Have you had good enough results with that method to make a substantial enlargement?

BebuLamar

cactuspic wrote:

Babu, from what I have read, the underexposure is substantial and lifting the exposure in post introduces a great deal of noise. Also, the shadows may be too dim to lift, particularly if there is any orange in them. But I have not tried it yet. Have you had good enough results with that method to make a substantial enlargement?

No in fact I have a great deal of problem copying the negative. I can't get the negative flat enough and the negative contrast is very low and you have to increase it in post greatly. But if I do it again I would set the camera white balance and exposure so that the orange base alone would be 255,255,255 or very close to it. I would white balance it to make it perfect gray then increase exposure to get it close or at the burn out point.

DennisC. Loc: Antelope, CA

I work at a photo/video/audio shop, we scan thousands of slides, negatives, prints and artwork each year. I have found through lots of testing that no camera will beat an Epson scanner with a transparency adapter for image quality and sharpness. Not even the D850 with the new slide/neg adapter.

cactuspic Loc: Dallas, TX

DennisC. wrote:

I work at a photo/video/audio shop, we scan thousands of slides, negatives, prints and artwork each year. I have found through lots of testing that no camera will beat an Epson scanner with a transparency adapter for image quality and sharpness. Not even the D850 with the new slide/neg adapter.

Dennis, have you tried the canon 5DS R using multiple exposures and HDR in your test?

DennisC. Loc: Antelope, CA

No, but I borrowed a 5DIII and IV and compared them to the Nikon D850. Very good results from the Canons but the D850 is a cleaner image with more neutral color and it really shows in copy work, makes printing easier. The Epson scanners are still better than all the cameras, especially when scanning film, more detail and consistent results. I get a lot of faded, scratched and just plain lousy images to scan, I guess they are important to someone. The models I am using are the 4870 Photo and the V800 photo. The image quality is basically the same from both scanners, the V800 does preview faster and holds 12 35mm slides vs 8 on the 4870. I like the film holders better on the 4870, and I use to use the Silverfast software but now I like the Epson professional better.

cactuspic Loc: Dallas, TX

Thanks Dennis, I appreciate the info

Irwin

BebuLamar

Why would you want to use HDR? The negative dynamic range is only 5 stops maximum.

cactuspic Loc: Dallas, TX

BebuLamar wrote:

Why would you want to use HDR? The negative dynamic range is only 5 stops maximum.

It helps if I want to lift the shadows up. At 5 stops, the signal to noise ratio would be 32x worse in the shadows. (hope I did the math right) Lifting those shadows amplifies the noise differential. By having one or more exposure that severely overexposes the slides, much more information is recorded in the shadow areas. Often I can extract another gradation of detail from the shadows. Some of your slide scannering software, such as Silverfast, has a multi-exposure mode, for this reason. I don’t need it on every slide but on some it makes a difference.

BebuLamar

cactuspic wrote:

It helps if I want to lift the shadows up. At 5 s... (show quote)

Using HDR means you compress the dynamic range of a high dynamic range subject to a narrower dynamic range. The image on a negative is already compressed. It captures a 9 stops dynamic range subject and compresses into 5 stops. In post you must expand the dynamic range by increasing the contrast otherwise the image would be very flat.

I can't see why you run into noise problem trying to photograph a 5 stops (or less because that's the max) dynamic range subject at the base ISO (there is no reason to use anything higher than the base ISO while copying the negative).

cactuspic Loc: Dallas, TX

Bebu, I can’t give you a better explanation than I previously wrote other than it appears to work. Both Silverdast and Viewscan can use a multi exposure mode to extract more detail from the shadowsin their scans. Silverfast uses HDR to combine the multiple scans and I assumed Vuescan did too. Here is an explanation of the multiple exposure HDR by Silverfast: http://www.silverfast.com/highlights/multi-exposure/en.html Hope that answers your question