[digiKam-users] Fwd: scanning images/negatives [a bit offtopic]

[James Orr]

I have scanned a couple thousand negatives into DigiKam. Some were scanned using the CanoScan equipment. Not too cheap, and better than paying someone else to do the work. I ended up buying a low cost air paintbrush and use the compressor for low pressure air and the paint nozzle for blowing as much dust away as I can manage. I did not do this at first and it cost me many many hours in post-production to clean the images.

I've also scanned unmounted 35mm negatives and mounted 35mm slides. On the scanner it was incredibly slow. Fortunately, I had a T-mount slide copier from film photography days. Getting a T-mount adapter for my camera was not much of a problem. Much faster.

In order to have consistent light, I modified a small LED portrait light into the reproduction light source. I made a baffle  set up to keep the light source as close to the lens as possible, and far enough that the LEDs would blur and give even illumination. There is just a little vignetting at the corners from time to time.

You can use the live view software of your choice to photograph directly into computer storage. Organize and tag in DigiKam, and use whatever software you like to develop the raw images into usable ones.

This method results in file sizes that depend on your camera sensor's capability. Speed! That is what you get. Several slides per minute rather than several minutes per slide. Plus, it is easy to bracket exposures. Then you can use HDR to get the best dynamic range possible from what you have.

James M. Orr
2705 E Sussex Way
Fresno CA 93726
________________________________

7

If you could look with wisdom's eye you'd see:
The person that you count on is your foe.
It's better in these days to make few friends,
and always keep your distance when you speak.

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam– Juan Cole (trans) 2020

On 10/26/2022 12:19 PM, Daniel Bauer wrote:


Am 26.10.22 um 18:52 schrieb Mike Morrison:
A possibly faster alternative worth considering is to use a camera instead of a scanner.

Peter Krogh gives an overview and some tips for even better quality here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yxmFjvFLPu4 <https://youtube.com/watch?v=yxmFjvFLPu4><https://youtube.com/watch?v=yxmFjvFLPu4>


Thank you very much for this very interesting link.

I have an archive of uncountable negatives and actually considered all those images of my earlier work as lost, as I could never afford to let them scan professionally and doing it myself with a scanner is way too much time and effort (I bought such a scanner years ago and did some trials but finally gave up).

I also have reproduced some of my old prints with the camera but, although photographic reproduction was part of my apprenticeship as a photographer "a hundred years ago", I haven't been happy with the results and on the other hand I didn't want to invest a lot of time to learn by myself on trial and error.

Now that I know that there is a book by somebody really specialized in this, offering a possible way to bring y negatives to a new life, is fantastic.

Watching this video filled me with the hope that maybe I can re-use some of my old work - project-fantasies are already filling y head :-)

So again: thanks for the link!

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digikam-users/attachments/20221027/ec86e7b8/attachment-0001.htm>