35mm slides to digital (Page 5): "Bill, since you know Lightroom Classic and ACR, you should experiment with the sliders to recover shadow and highlight information

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

burkphoto wrote:

Bill, since you know Lightroom Classic and ACR, you should experiment with the sliders to recover shadow and highlight information — pull down the highlights and pull up the shadows. You'll be surprised how much you can recover from a raw file! I was never able to get a natural look in prints from slides until I camera scanned them to raw files and pulled the sliders around. Experiment with sharpening and noise reduction, too. You'll soon learn what works best with each film type and have starting points for each film family.

Anyone who gets really serious about it should follow the links in that white paper I posted. I'm a HUGE believer in the Essential Film Holder system (EFH). It's inexpensive, well-engineered, and easy to use for slides and negatives from 35mm to size 120 formats up to 6x9 cm. I feel the same about Negative Lab Pro, which I use for black-and-white and color negatives. Version 3.x is excellent. It works great with the latest version of LrC. Since I do lots of conversions, NLP is an essential part of my workflow and was a trivial (<$100) expense considering what it does — and the time it saves. The little Viltrox L-116t LED light panel is very good, about 95+ CRI, and only slightly deficient in the deep red portion of the spectrum. It runs cool and works great with the diffuser in the EFH.

Anyone working with negatives larger than 35mm (6x4.5, 6x6, 6x7, 6x8, or 6x9 cm) will benefit from a camera with more than 16MP. I'll probably switch to a 25MP Lumix G9 II soon, which also has a 100 MP mode on it that is made possible by stepping and repeating the exposure many times, moving the sensor slightly each time. Olympus OM-1 from OM-Systems has a similar feature. Of course, if you have the medium format Fujifilm 100MP GFX 100S, with a macro lens, you have sensor real estate to burn. Those big sensels resolve REAL 100 MP detail. That's a great solution if you do commercial work and need a scan from a 4x5 or larger film, so you can use the real swings and tilts on a view camera.

Bill, since you know Lightroom Classic and ACR, yo... (show quote)

"Bill, since you know Lightroom Classic and ACR, you should experiment with the sliders to recover shadow and highlight information — pull down the highlights and pull up the shadows. You'll be surprised how much you can recover from a raw file! "

You don't really think I posted those shots straight out of the camera do you?

Leland22 Loc: Texas

I love your camera stand. I know what most of the coupling are but some I am trying to figure out the use/logic. I am a Mr Fixit. If you have other photos of it, send to my email. leland415@yahoo.com. Thanks.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

bsprague wrote:

"Bill, since you know Lightroom Classic and ACR, you should experiment with the sliders to recover shadow and highlight information — pull down the highlights and pull up the shadows. You'll be surprised how much you can recover from a raw file! "

You don't really think I posted those shots straight out of the camera do you?

Point taken! Sorry if I made an improper assumption.

The first one does look so contrasty, I thought it might have been SOOC.

I have had to bracket exposures of slides and make multiple exposures for HDR in order to recover detail in shadows. Not much can be done about blown highlights, but there are typically up to three stops of shadow detail to be played with in K64 originals. Slides that I somehow kept despite severe underexposure have been recovered pretty well.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

bsprague wrote:

Compared to the digital perfection we expect now, I don't know what to expect from slides. When I used to view them it was from a distance on a screen so I don't remember pixel peeping like I might do now.

That’s been my point. We should not do the equivalent of putting our virtual nose against the slide screen.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

rehess wrote:

That’s been my point. We should not do the equivalent of putting our virtual nose against the slide screen.

Film has a softness to it that can be enhanced with subtle digital sharpening and noise reduction. A little goes a long way.

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

burkphoto wrote:

Point taken! Sorry if I made an improper assumption.

The first one does look so contrasty, I thought it might have been SOOC.

I have had to bracket exposures of slides and make multiple exposures for HDR in order to recover detail in shadows. Not much can be done about blown highlights, but there are typically up to three stops of shadow detail to be played with in K64 originals. Slides that I somehow kept despite severe underexposure have been recovered pretty well.

"I have had to bracket exposures of slides and make multiple exposures for HDR in order to recover detail in shadows."

That will be fun to try. The first slide with the guy counting money got a heavy dose of the Shadows slider to reveal his face and hands. The SOOC didn't get it.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

bsprague wrote:

"I have had to bracket exposures of slides and make multiple exposures for HDR in order to recover detail in shadows."

That will be fun to try. The first slide with the guy counting money got a heavy dose of the Shadows slider to reveal his face and hands. The SOOC didn't get it.

In that case, there may not be anything else there. I'll take blackness over milky film base...

Unfortunately, this process isn't for everyone. Lots of folks want to make JPEGs in the camera and forget about post-processing. To them, I say, white balance for the light source, then use 100% manual exposure and bracket.

Using a camera's dynamic range compensation processing options may help JPEG makers, as may adjusting in-camera curves. Even then, lots of folks don't want to change settings they might forget to cancel later. [sigh]

levinton

awis01 wrote:

I have an epson perfection v-500 scanner. I digitized many years of 35mm slides and am very happy with it. I would be interested in hearing what other hogs have to recommend.

I still wonder whether and which digital camera allows you to make a 5 foot high print
of a standing human. Also is there a pixel number equivalent for a 2 x 2 rollei or Hasselblad
image?

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

levinton wrote:

I still wonder whether and which digital camera allows you to make a 5 foot high print
of a standing human. Also is there a pixel number equivalent for a 2 x 2 rollei or Hasselblad
image?

There is a huge misconception that the "300 PPI rule" is necessarily scaleable. It isn't. In fact 300 PPI is based on a 5x7 print size. 240 PPI will do for an 8x10. 200 works for an 11x14. 180 works for a 16x20. I won't get into the physics of it here, but our vision resolves less at greater distances.

Think of a 55" HDTV with a 1920x1080 pixel display... If you view it from across the room at five feet or more, it's sharp, crisp and "dot free." But if you view it from 30", you can probably see the individual LEDs that make up the picture.

A size 120 film negative in the nominal 6x6 cm or "2.25" square" format is 56mm square. That's 2.21 inches. I would want to scan that at 3200 dpi*, or photograph it with at least that size pixel resolution (7000x7000 to 8000x8000 pixels in the output file). That would preserve everything in the original film.

*Scanner resolution is measured in input dots, which have dimension. Digital camera resolution is measured in output pixels, which are just numbers. A 1:1 film scan at a given dpi will result in a file of the same PPI, so 2.21 inches of film scanned at 3200 dpi yields 7072 pixels in the file. That's probably NOT as good as a digital camera image, because scanner dpi does NOT translate to optical resolution. An Epson V600 will yield around 1800 dpi optical resolution when set to 2400 PPI. You can set it higher than that, but the amount of detail it resolves does not increase. You just make bigger files. High end scanners do better.

MrBob Loc: lookout Mtn. NE Alabama

rehess wrote:

That’s been my point. We should not do the equivalent of putting our virtual nose against the slide screen.

You mean you don't take a magnifying glass to an art museum to try and determine how many bristles were on the artist's brush... I don't think YOU would but there are some...

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

MrBob wrote:

You mean you don't take a magnifying glass to an art museum to try and determine how many bristles were on the artist's brush... I don't think YOU would but there are some...

Photographers as a group tend to be hypercritical. Some want everything to look like a contact print from an 8x10 view camera negative made with a pricey lens and ISO 6 film. "Real world people" will accept far less.

For MOST imagery, a print that looks good at the diagonal of its dimensions has enough resolution. But for subjects that demand a closer view, such as group photos of many people (graduating classes, marching bands, etc.) the more resolution you capture, the better. Tiny faces need to be viewed closely to be seen, and that means they need enough pixels to show their details.

MrBob Loc: lookout Mtn. NE Alabama

burkphoto wrote:

Photographers as a group tend to be hypercritical.... (show quote)

Yes, being in the business I suppose you are correct... It seems like sometimes we get SO absorbed in the technical aspects that we kind of lose sight of the forest for the trees... I wonder how a capture with a" Pinhole " camera be treated here ?

topcat Loc: Alameda, CA

I had an old scanner that I was able to use on my Win 10 computer, by turning on legacy in the options. But it is just as easy to buy a newer scanner and do them yourself, it is easy. But it takes time. I tried the copy with a macro, but I found that the scanner worked better. Esp if you have a lot to scan.

Either way will take some time, but it can be fun to scan these old images and fool around with them.

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

My parents have boxes of old slides from back when Kodak put them in METAL holders!

levinton

Scanning a 120 negative at ca 3200 and making a 6 foot high print from the negative and digital file would be an interesting expt. Have always been impressed how sharp such large prints from film can be, albeit in B&W. Maybe some post processing helps here, as in Avedon’s murals exhibit at MMA.