One way to greatly speed up film scans is to use your DSLR as the scanner.
You need a macro lens, the film scanner negative or slide holder to hold your film flat, some kind of a bracket to hold the film in front of the macro lens, a blue filter to help cancel the orange mask in negative film, and a light source. I bolted the camera to a 2x6" piece of wood using the same quick release brackets which my Manfrotto tripods use. Some 90 degree angle brackets from the hardware store keep the film at right angles to the lens. Some screws run into the 2x6" wood keep the negative holder level and high enough in front of the lens. A square blue filter is between the negatives and the light box, and the box is sitting on the table behind it all, shining through the filter, through the negatives, then right into the macro lens. Take some paper and cut out a rectangular hole, then place this mask on the surface of the light box to let in enough light to shine on the negative without swamping the entire lens with white light. Manual white balance on a clear empty frame. Watch your contrast and exposure so you don't blow either end of the histogram. I use this contraption each time we do a wedding, since we have some film secondary cameras (K1000 is still in use!). You can do a roll almost as fast as you can cut the negatives and get them in front of the lens. There is still plenty of color correction per image, but you can get some nice results. Note that the resolution of the scan is no better than the resolution of your digital camera. The final image is not as good as if you had taken the image with the digital camera in the first place. It's still better than the kind of scan you get from the local quick lab, though. I found it useful to have a local pro lab do the film development. Hardly any dust or scratches compared to the cheap labs. Blast everything with a blower bulb before scanning. I really wish the industry had made better film scanning available at the time of development. They could still have a stong film demand if their scans were better. Automatic dust and scratch removal, less file compression, and a bias against blown highlights (WOW! SUPER CONTRAST AND COLORS!!!) could have made the local lab machine a much better film scanner. By the way, the local machine has around 1200x1800 resolution, but each pixel is scanned by three colors, unlike most digital cameras, so the image quality can be much closer to a 6M pixel camera than you might expect. Too bad they then compress it and blast the highlights so much. Brian -- Brian Dunn Photographic http://www.bdphotographic.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
