Dear Group, I have lot of film material (negatives and slides) that I want to convert to digital. I have a good Minolta film scanner, at that time I paid more for it than a K20D costs :-). It delivers good quality but it takes far to much time to be used on larger quantities of pictures........... So I want to work out a faster method using my K10D. July PUG gave a last push, because that black and white negative had to be digitized. I worked out the following, remarks, questions and suggestions are most welcome! _ The hardware_ Aim is to get a 1:1 image of the slide (36x24) on the sensor of my K10D (approx 24x18) I would like to use my SMC-M 100/4 macro or my SMC-M 50/1.7 because they are mechanically compatible with my Pentax slide copier. autobellows M with slide copier does not work: lens cannot come close enough to the body. I made a metal bracket to connect the slide copier directly to the body. 1:1 can be reached with SMC-M 50/1.7 with 20+12mm macro rings from PANAGOR Aperture of lens set to 11 as compromise for sharpnees / depth of field to allow some unflatness of the film and to allow for some misalignment of slide copier, lens and body. ISO 100 for best noise performance. Using flash light from behind the slide copier, Adjusting flash power and / or flash distance to get the histogram more or less in the middle. Contrast of negative film is low, so exposure is not really critical This set op allows quick reproduction
Now the Software part. The image contrast on negative film is low and has to be increased a lot in the processing. Unfortunately the K10D does not have a setting for negative film copying. That would be nice if the contrast range could be adjusted to cover the full range of the AD converter, than 8 bits could be enough. We donot have that, so we must use RAW to get more bits. In the processing the higher number of bits has to be maintained till the contrast expansion is done. For the image processing I use Photoshop Elements 6.0 with the free downloadable plug-in "SmartCurve" this plug-in is very powerfull and increases the value of PSE a lot for me. After importing the file in PSE, do not forget to tick the 16bit square (remember 8 bit is not enough for negative film) rotate the picture 1 or 2 degrees if needed crop the picture convert to black and white by selecting "gray tones" Select filter "smartcurve" this curve allows to invert the negative to positive (vertical flip of the curve), to choose the white level and the black level (expand contrast to best possible value) and fine tune gamma (mid gray) if needed Now convert the immage to 720pixels voor longest side (PUG requirement) Adjust sharpness for best compromise at normal viewing distance (take care more sharpness can result in more visibility of film grain!) Go back to 8 bits to be able to save as jpeg Save as Jpeg while selecting maximum quality level with file size below 256kb (PUG requirement) and file name with max 8 characters (PUG requirement) This worked for me. Suggestions for quality or speed improvements are most welcome :-) Jos -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
