Negative copying, FD Bellows and kit. Need help from those familiar with this gear please.

Jul 30, 2010
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Photo Shop will do a good job on correct color over cast and skin tone. I have the following experience with the Epson V600, It may or may not apply to your scanner: 1. Color restoration does a very good job. It may still need color correction with Photo Shop. 2. The dust removal function may threat the eyes as dust ( if the eye is relatively small ).
Also do not be over sold by the high dpi of the scanner. even st 4800 dpi, it is already beyond the reolution of the 35mm color negatives.
 
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dcm

Enjoy the gear you have!
CR Pro
Apr 18, 2013
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Colorado, USA
Thanks, that is bound to help a little. There did seem to be some funny appearance that might relate to wax but as I finally got better acquainted with the scanner and started to use the Infrared mask feature it seems to do an excellent job but only on colour film. Here is a sample from a dusty negative.

I am having a challenge totally removing the colour cast that seems to remain with auto settings

Jack
Looks pretty clean! I tried different manual settings to find one that didn't overprocess the original and lose details in VueScan. You might try the same thing in SilverFast.

Yep, no infrared on B&W film. A good cleaning is needed and some small touch ups. I did a fair amount of B&W images going back to early 1940s.

One of the reasons I chose VueScan was the builtin film profiles, https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/html/vuesc25.htm#topic19. I could identify the type of film from the border and enter that to get the correct color balance. It looks like Silverfast has something similar https://www.silverfast.com/show/negafixprofiles/it.html.
 
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Jack Douglas

CR for the Humour
Apr 10, 2013
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Alberta, Canada
Looks pretty clean! I tried different manual settings to find one that didn't overprocess the original and lose details in VueScan. You might try the same thing in SilverFast.

Yep, no infrared on B&W film. A good cleaning is needed and some small touch ups. I did a fair amount of B&W images going back to early 1940s.

One of the reasons I chose VueScan was the builtin film profiles, https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/html/vuesc25.htm#topic19. I could identify the type of film from the border and enter that to get the correct color balance. It looks like Silverfast has something similar https://www.silverfast.com/show/negafixprofiles/it.html.
Thanks, There are profiles but I have to go by memory of 40+ years on the film type - I see Kodak and nothing more specific on the strip. I seem to remember gold and ISO could be 100-400. I have ON1 but haven't become proficient with it yet and don't know if it can do what you're describing easily. I am pretty pleased and realize that the resolution exceeds the film capability. I read good comments about Vuescan but I don't want to spend more if I can help it.

Jack
 
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Jack Douglas

CR for the Humour
Apr 10, 2013
6,980
2,602
Alberta, Canada
Photo Shop will do a good job on correct color over cast and skin tone. I have the following experience with the Epson V600, It may or may not apply to your scanner: 1. Color restoration does a very good job. It may still need color correction with Photo Shop. 2. The dust removal function may threat the eyes as dust ( if the eye is relatively small ).
Also do not be over sold by the high dpi of the scanner. even st 4800 dpi, it is already beyond the reolution of the 35mm color negatives.
Thanks for the tip on the eyes! ;)
 
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dcm

Enjoy the gear you have!
CR Pro
Apr 18, 2013
1,088
846
Colorado, USA
...
Also do not be over sold by the high dpi of the scanner. even st 4800 dpi, it is already beyond the reolution of the 35mm color negatives.

Agreed. I used a slide target to measure resolution across my scanners and cameras at their native resolutions with these results to see where I reached a point of diminishing returns. Increasing megapixels on film scanners mostly increases noise since film may only have 4000 DPI of data. BTW, this was the resolution of the Nikon CoolScan V film scanner.

One article notes that the actual sensor resolution on the XAs is 5000x10000 DPI with interpolation to get the 10000x10000 DPI in the marketing literature. Appears he was working in 5000 DPI mode for this reason. It also notes this is far more resolution than your film likely has and will produce large files (34 MP).
 
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dcm

Enjoy the gear you have!
CR Pro
Apr 18, 2013
1,088
846
Colorado, USA
Thanks, There are profiles but I have to go by memory of 40+ years on the film type - I see Kodak and nothing more specific on the strip. I seem to remember gold and ISO could be 100-400. I have ON1 but haven't become proficient with it yet and don't know if it can do what you're describing easily. I am pretty pleased and realize that the resolution exceeds the film capability. I read good comments about Vuescan but I don't want to spend more if I can help it.

Jack

I had a lot of Kodak film going back to the 70s. It usually had a number on the edge of the string. The VueScan table lists what should appear on the edge for the different types of film, including the stripe colors. The oldest film was Kodacolor II (Kodak safety film 5075 green/green) and Kodacolor CII (Kodak Safety Film 5035 none/green).

Check out this list of discontinued film to identify by date. Prior to 1963 it was probably Kodacolor (C-22). Prior to 1972 it was Kodacolor X (C-22). I don't see profiles for any early Kodacolor films in Silverfast. Given the difference process/emulsion you may not get good results with other profiles. Lots of discussions asking for it, no mentions of anyone creating one. The problem is that they don't have the old emulsions to create a profile. You may have to wing it and adjust the color balance manually.
 
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Jack Douglas

CR for the Humour
Apr 10, 2013
6,980
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Alberta, Canada
Agreed. I used a slide target to measure resolution across my scanners and cameras at their native resolutions with these results to see where I reached a point of diminishing returns. Increasing megapixels on film scanners mostly increases noise since film may only have 4000 DPI of data. BTW, this was the resolution of the Nikon CoolScan V film scanner.

One article notes that the actual sensor resolution on the XAs is 5000x10000 DPI with interpolation to get the 10000x10000 DPI in the marketing literature. Appears he was working in 5000 DPI mode for this reason. It also notes this is far more resolution than your film likely has and will produce large files (34 MP).
Thanks for the links. There is a lot to become familiar with.
 
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If your goal is to copy and digitize your negetives, you might be better off spend $250 and get an Epson V600 photo scanner. I have one and I highly recommend it. It wil do negetives (up to 6cmX6cm), 35mm slides and photo ( up t0 8 1/2 " X 11 1/2 ")
Same for me with my Epson V500 working with Windows 11. Just need to fiddle around with a few tests to find the right settings to get the right size output.
 
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I do not have excess contrast either with slide, negative or photo with the Epson V600. The real problem of scanning slide and negative is how to keep the original free of dust. The attached picture is from a slide that is over 30 years old.View attachment 194655
Without my Epson V500 there is an option called Digital ICE which removes scratches and dust pretty efficiently, enough to save time and limit the number of manual cleaning. Regularly need to dust the scanner glass and the slide. I’m happy with outcome which in TIFF mode allows plenty of post processing with losing too much quality. I’m saving hundreds of slides so I have to accept that its not perfect for all but better than never seeing them in the slide box. If I want to do a very high quality perfect output may need to spend more time on cleaning before scanning and have more manual post processing
 
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Without my Epson V500 there is an option called Digital ICE which removes scratches and dust pretty efficiently, enough to save time and limit the number of manual cleaning. Regularly need to dust the scanner glass and the slide. I’m happy with outcome which in TIFF mode allows plenty of post processing with losing too much quality. I’m saving hundreds of slides so I have to accept that its not perfect for all but better than never seeing them in the slide box. If I want to do a very high quality perfect output may need to spend more time on cleaning before scanning and have more manual post processing
Within my Epson V500 software….I meant
 
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stevelee

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Jul 6, 2017
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VuScan lets you save Raw scans. I have not seen any advantage in using that except when I scanned a daguerrotype. ACR did a surprisingly good job with that file.

Couldn’t you can a blank frame or sample the color for a clear area of film to get the color of the mask and compensate accordingly? I haven’t scanned any color negatives in a long time, but when I did, I was quite impressed with VuScan’s extraction of the mask.
 
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