Hi,
Don Sanderson wrote:
I was looking at an HP scanner at the store today that advertised '35mm adapter built in'. The adapter was just a film strip holder that slid into grooves in the scanners lid. No light behind it, no gap between it and the lid, all it appeared to do was hold the negatives flat and straight. Soooooo... I figured heck, all I have to do is lay a strip of negatives on the scanner glass and have at it. So I tried just that with a strip of 4 good 6x6 Agfa Optima negs, the result was less than impressive! Even with the best exposed negs the result was just a total mess. Dark, grainy, no contrast, no definition, nada! This was done with the negs face up and down, at every setting I could think of on my scanner. I could 'invert' the scan and compensate for the mask color OK but could get nothing usable at all from the image. I scanned at 300, 600 and 1200 DPI on my HP 750xi and brought the result into PS CS for editing.
I'm obviously having a brain cramp here, could anyone please enlighten me as to what I'm doing/thinking wrong? :-(
Film scanning is a transmissive process, whereby light is shone _through_ the obect being scanned, rather than reflected off it. If you really must persist with the idea (it will all end in tears) you can build yourself a little magic pyramid from white card that scoops up some of the light the scanner gives out and reflects it back through the film. Like this:
.
. .
. .
. .
. ====== .
------------------------Where -- is the scanner glass, = is your film and ... is the card. All in section. The light goes up on the right, is reflected around the card and (some of it) goes back down through the film. Quality will be appalling.
mike
