Copying slides, pictures, negatives best method?

[ericmark]

I have seen the box for my Xmas present it's an Aldi Maginon MS 7100 scanner. Well not sure really if a scanner or a camera and light box as it seems it has a 5.1 megapixels CMOS sensor which makes me think it's a camera and light box?

I already have a slide copier with a Pentax K mount and a K10D Pentax, but the sensor in the DSLR is cut down so can't capture the whole image.

For prints the standard scanner is likely the best, but for slides and negatives my copying has not been the best. Getting the light correct seems to be a problem. I wave the camera around when copying so as to stop shadows affecting the result, but dust is also a huge problem with the DSLR so once copied then I have to put them into Photoshop and remove blemishes.

In the main all pictures reduced to 1400 x 1050 which is the exhibition standard for DPI's in most clubs, so 5 MP is not really a problem.

Tried years ago to use a light box, still some where in the loft, but it used a fluorescent tube, which is not the best for colour rendering. I had considered using a light box, and a macro filter.

So I have what one may consider two types of slide/film to copy. 1) Record shots, quality not really that important but don't really want a cropped image. 2) Display shots, want to show off to best advantage, including if required work in Photoshop to enhance.

So thoughts please, no idea how good new scanner will be? It would seem 24 bit, no info as to format of pictures, RAW, Jpeg etc. Can't see how 24 bit, and Jpeg can go together? It says option of +/- 2 EV so I suppose I can copy 2 or 3 times and open with the Photomatrix add-on with Photoshop, but as yet still in the box. Just looking at box waiting to have a go.

 

[Sam Gangee]

The best results are obtained by using a drum scanner. These are expensive and a PITB to use. Prices start around £10,000 for a cheap one.

At the other end of the scale you can get tolerably good quality from a not-too-cheap flatbed scanner.
http://www.glodark.com/epson.htm

And read this: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/scantek.htm

 

[ericmark]

My printer/scanner does not have any non reflected light simple white soft base which presses photos onto the glass. So for a photo it is A1 but for a slide or film useless.

I read what it says about 12 bit and 14 bit and this has been an argument used for the standard DNG (digital negative) introduced by Adobe. My Pentax has the option to save as a DNG or PEF the latter Pentax's own RAW file format. Both are 12 bit and really as to which is used is personal preference. However my Nikon RAW files (NEF) are 14 bit so converting to DNG means some info is lost. As to how much info is in those 2 bits and as to if Adobe Camera RAW 6.5 can read those 2 bits is open for debate. The same applies to any other software be it Rawtherapee or Photomatrix as the user I really don't know if the software uses those 2 bits.

Software built into camera and likes of DxO Optics and Photomatix are very good at auto S curves or local tone mapping and to improve upon the auto results does take some skill. However reducing from 12, 14, 16, 32 bit to the 8 bit used with a jpeg can clearly make or break the picture for any report to claim other wise.

The Myth of 42 or 36 or 14 or 16 Bit Scanning

You can safely forget about how many bits (8, 10, 12, 14 or 16 per channel, or 24, 30, 36, 42 or 48 bits per sample) a scanner claims to have. These have nothing to do with how good your scan will look.

The illustrations on the boxes of some Microtek scanners and sales literature for the Minolta Multi Pro are complete lies, plain and simple.

Until that point I was reading with interest. Then I realised who ever was writing the report has tried to over simply and one has to question also the rest of the report as a result.

The problem with scanning is is an old one dating back to Alexander Bain (12 October 1810 – 2 January 1877) and Giovani Caselli (1815–1891) who built one of the first machines is to get the timing correct. I believe there is still one of the original machines in Paris it's 10 foot tall and weighs 5 ton most of it being the pendulum essential to get correct timing. With cameras this is not as much of a problem and of course also far faster.

But there is also the focus and although a small aperture can help results vary. The cardboard, plastic, or even glass used to mount slides will vary in thickness which will not help with focus so it would seem all methods have their good and bad points. At least the new scanner should grab whole image unlike the cropped sensor of both my DSLR's.

But it's often hard to see defects what is simply lack of using unsharp mask and what is true blurring of the image.

But more maybe to the point is the operator. I am sure I can alter the EV value with my scanner. However never worked out how to do it. Some will see having to set exposure as bad and others as good. I am now just waiting to open the box and give it a go. So just crossing my fingers.

I will never get a drum scanner options are the Aldi scanner, my slide copier, or macro lens and taping them to a light box. Never tried the latter. Using either methods with DSLR means RAW file which needs converting so all in all rather slow. So fingers crossed.

 

[Sam Gangee]

I'm not sure why you asked the question. It looks like an excuse to boast about your apparently superior knowledge of the subject. Superior even to expert Ken Rockwell.

 

[ericmark]

I am sorry I did not intend to criticise you. The bit on the Epson photo scanner was very interesting. The "Note that the white pad is removed from the "lid" unit." which pointed out how the scanner was very different from the normal scanner in how light goes through the slide or negative.

It seems on re-reading I must apologise I missed some important points. 1) "Unless you have Photoshop 6.0 you can't do much of anything with 42 bit images, even if you can read them." There have been 8 major upgrades since 6.0 after 7 it went to CS1 ~ 6 and finally the cloud with Photoshop 6 there was no RAW reader in the software so he was correct at that time nothing one could do with the extra info recorded. 2) CCD has in the main been replaced with CMOS which is far more sensitive. My Pentax with a CCD can have the ISO set to 100 ~ 1600 although really 800 is the limit. My Nikon with a CMOS sensor however can have the ISO set from 100 ~ 25600 although standard top is 6400 after that it's called HI 1 ~ 3. The report is rather dated it seems I missed the © 2006 Ken Rockwell bit which does not seem that long ago. PS 6 came out in 2000 and PS 7 in 2002 the RAW converter was a plug-in latter that year but 2003 before it was standard. By 2006 we were on to CS2 and the third RAW converter but clearly the page was written before 2006 so did not include that technology. It was about 2006 that the CMOS started to replace the CCD my K10D Pentax was CCD came out September 2006, my D7000 Nikon is CMOS the latter came out September 2010. So in those two years there was a revolution as to what a camera could do.

 

[Lucid]

This idea of an A/B choice between JPEG and RAW for file formats is camera thinking rather than computer thinking. A scanner can output as an uncompressed RGB data format preserving the full resolution of the scanned image. What one then decides to do with it is a choice determined by whether the file is to be edited or it's ready for final output. The display medium then determines appropriate choices of file format. For example, I use .PNG for output destined to be seen by Facebook viewers because FB doesn't resample the image on upload whereas it does with .JPEG.

Remember too, even if you work with high bit-depth images you're still only viewing via a monitor that works in the 8 or 10 bit domain. That's largely true also for anyone viewing these images from hosting sites.

 

[Dave54]

You can get slides professionally drum scanned and dust and specks removed. Prices seem to vary and I haven't looked for a long time. I'd suspect quality varies as well.
The biggest job with any scan of film / negs / slides is the dust and scratch removal process. I know several people who have scanned and processed slides for addition to commercial online agencies, and have decided that the effort isn't really worth the return.
Polaroid used to do a free dust and scratch removal program. A search online will find it.
As far as actual quality goes, I can only go by my own experience. I've tried photographing slides on a glass table, with diffuser and flash behind, using a Pentax K5 with a good quality macro lens. It gives a good result and is reasonably quick once the camera is set up on a tripod with remote shutter release. Couple of guides taped to the glass make changing the slides faster. The results are good.
To scan lots of slides we have from my late father in law, for home consumption, I thought I'd risk a Silverline slide scanner from Lidl a while back. Once set up, I'm honestly surprised how good the quality is. It compares well with the DSLR, although it is a smaller file.

I'm not a believer in umpteen bits being necessarily that much better. It depends on the image, the processing, and the intended end use. Generally, for most uses an 8 bit jpeg using minimum compression is good enough as a final output, although sometimes it can get difficult to avoid very slight banding (which most people wouldn't even see) with very subtle gradients like skies. I usually convert to 8 bit tiffs from RAW in RawTherapee where I make any the changes such as "exposure" which might be "destructive". I output to 8 bit Tiff and do any cloning and so on in that type. Final output as Jpeg. I've tried processing in 16 bit, and I honestly can't say that I can see any significant difference to the end result.

Bigger bit depth does of course make for much bigger file sizes.

Just to say finally that I have submitted to online photo agencies for the last ten years and have several thousand images with them. One of the agencies was known to be extremely strict on quality standards. I view everything at 100% on a reasonably good quality display, a Dell U2410.

I haven't as yet sent up any scans of slides.

 

[ericmark]

Thank you for your frank replies. My film and slide banks were good enough to print or display without any fiddling with. Although with black and white I would dodge and burn this was not really an option with colour. As to the idea of multi-scans and blending the results to increase the dynamic range all well and good today when I know at the point of taking what I can do latter, but for old negatives likely if it needed that already dumped as at the time I never expected to be able to recover the detail.

As said finished result is normally Jpeg, I do use PNG mainly as one can save parts of a photo with no back-ground but not as final image other than some specials with java script which to be frank were failures as swap screen and result changed.

Well one more day before I try so looking forward to seeing how it does. I will guess it will require Photoshop to fine tune? but I hope it will be only small tweaks and I will not need to use layers and masks on most images, what I wonder is what the scanner output is? Instructions don't say but will guess Jpeg.

 

[Dave54]

I haven't used my scanner for a while, but without setting it up IIRC it has the option to output as TIFF or Jpeg. Certainly TIFF as I have just looked at some scans. My scanner outputs through Arcsoft Media Impression. IIRC it doesn't get recognised as a scanner through Windows. (I did look into that, but there's apparently nothing to be done) Anyway, that's not really a hardship as the program is OK and does allow simple adjustments directly from the interface. Otherwise just leave it "as is" and use PS or whatever editor you prefer.
Your scanner may be different. I did see them on sale at Aldi. Hope it hope it works well for you.

 

[ericmark]

Not impressed. Slides had a ribbing showing through, found due to incorrect setting, but the negatives did scan OK. But the grain was very apparent. Not sure if grain was always there and not visible with small print sizes? Also all seemed to have scratches never used the negatives before they have sat in there pouches for years. Scanned the prints before. Not one negative was a simple scan all needed some work in Photoshop. Found negatives have around 2 EV more range than the Jpeg the scanner produces. I can produce 2 Jpegs and combine in Photoshop using the Photomatix plug in however that is a lot of work. Why it referred to 24 bit I don't know as there is no way to access a 24 bit image. It puts all images onto a SD card as Jpeg, you can then upload into PC from scanner but does not seem to scan direct into PC.

It has 6 buttons and two sliders it uses the same buttons for multi inputs according to mode selected. In USB mode all goes blank on scanner.
There are so many button presses required for example press enter to be able to change EV and correct colour using the arrow keys, press scan twice to allow saving then enter to save then enter again to alter EV with arrow keys then again scan twice and enter to save, to my mind too much fiddling.

Average time to scan 4 slides is 5 minutes there are 120 in each cassette and around 10 cassettes without even looking at those pictures not considered good enough to put into a cassette. It would take me weeks to go through this lot. All the dates are wrong and it seems there is no way to set the date on the scanner.

 

[Sam Gangee]

Twenty years ago I did some subcontract work for a company producing Photo-CDs. I arranged to hire batches of 35mm slides from photographers, send them for drum-scanning, then touch up the result in Photoshop. The parent company provided me with an Apple Mac Quadra 650CD - moderately fast in its day.

Every image needed about twenty minutes of work to disguise dust, scratches and hairs. Most were quite grainy on-screen, even though they had been scanned at quite high resolution (1200 dpi I think).

In addition, I found most photographers to be a nightmare to deal with. We were paying them for unlimited non-exclusive usage but they still wanted to impose their own conditions. I sent several batches of slides back to their owners, untouched because I wasn't prepared to haggle. Their loss, not mine.

 

[Gees]

I use a Microtek Scanmaker i900 with quite reasonable reults.
Its quite old now and will not work on a 64 bit OS.
I just use an old machine for scanning only.

 

[Dave54]

Thanks for getting back to us Eric. I suspect that the "24 bit output" is referring to the combination of the three eight bit channels in the jpeg. Pity about it being jpeg only output, but it should be OK as long as the actual scan is reasonable quality, and minimum compression is used. Of course you don't want to save as jpeg during editing until the final output while working on the files, as you will start to lose quality due to recompressing each time. I expect you know that though.

Both methods I've tried, camera and scanner are fairly fiddly. They require each slide to be taken from the case or magazine, blown clean, as most have attracted dust and hair over the years, and in some cases re-mounted with modern plastic mounts as the original card ones come apart. Some are nearly 60 years old. The actual film grain is very apparent using either method I have used. Then as Sam Gangee says you have roughly twenty minutes of work in an editing program to remove dust and scratches. Fairly boring repetitive work that has to be right for the licensing purposes.

Can't believe that the photographers were difficult to deal with SG. . . Well OK then I can.
Different world then. Now we have to accept the agencies T&C before submitting. End of.

 

[ericmark]

Second batch has come out better. But clearly a lot of work required.

 

[Sam Gangee]

Then as Sam Gangee says you have roughly twenty minutes of work in an editing program to remove dust and scratches. Fairly boring repetitive work

And it gave me a "Repetitive Strain Injury" which required three weeks of rest. Very painful and one that I shan't be repeating. (Caused by a trackball device - I found a mouse much easier to use.)