the dSLR-as-copycamera workflow

[PatrickONeill]

The Workflow presented here is the accumulation of a few months of using my digital SLR as a way to digitize my film. from “scanning” to a post-ready jpg. It is not perfect, it is far from it. However, I thought I should share what I know, because there is hardly any sort of comprehensive tutorial for this technique to be found online.

Advantages to using a copy camera
1.low cost if you already have all of the equipment needed.
2.Digitization is fast, I can get a 36 exp roll digitzed and ready to edit on the computer in 15 minutes (not counting setup time)
3.low noise compared to film scanners
4.sharper than flat-bed scanners

disadvantages
1. There is no denying that this is hodgepodge
2. Only suitable for web and digital display, if you want prints larger than 8x10, you would be better served using a proper scanner or scanning service.
3. C-41 color is difficult to work with
4. It can be pain to set up, although it is quick when you get used to it (10 min setup) its best to digitize rolls in batches rather than setting it all up for one roll at a time as they get developed.
5. if you do not use a flat-field macro lens, you have to add distortion correction to your workflow.

questions, gripes and hand-wringing welcomed.

 

[PatrickONeill]

Equipment needed.

Equipment needed.

I have the benefit of having a bunch of crap laying around to get this working for me, I am lucky enough that I haven’t spent a dime on this set-up.

1. light box: “daylight color” balanced. although it says “daylight” it’s not really full spectrum light, so colors will need tweaking no matter what.
2. Film holder: I used an old film holder from a long lost canonscan flatbed scanner. it sort of sucks keeping negatives flat.
3. a sturdy tripod and head
4. a hot-shoe bubble level
5. a digital SLR (any will do) along with a 50mm prime lens, enough extension tubes to get in real close and a cir-pol filter (actually, a tungsten 80B fliter would be most excellent for C-41, but I’ll get to that later)

setting it all up is easy;
First, tape down the film holder to the light box, I use electrical tape, and I have it 90degrees from the orientation of the CFL bulb (voodoo reasons for this). Place the tripod over the lightbox and get it in low, Bogen tripods allow you to invert the telescoping center column, which makes this easy to use on a tabletop.
make sure the lightbox is level. same now for the camera.

Turn on the lamp, and wait 10-15 minutes to let the lamp warm up. Now is a good time to make sure the lightbox is clean and free from dust, and to check for dust on your SLR’s sensor.

setting up the SLR varies from make and model. Despite that, make sure you do a few things to make the SLR ready for copycamera use; turn on Mirror lock-up. set a 2sec timer if you do not have a remote. turn off noise reduction for long exposures. turn off auto rotate.

I get my film processed at a lab, but I tell them to not cut the negatives, this makes the process go a lot faster.

I have a dedicated CF card for digitizing, a small 1gig card that I download to the computer for each roll. plus, its good to keep digitizing seperate from your “daily-driver” equipment.

so, now that the lamp is warmed up, the light box is clean, the camera is clean and set up and level, we are ready to get your negatives out for scanning.

 

[PatrickONeill]

digitization

digitization

Line up the camera to the negative holder, bring it in real close so the holder fills the frame, place your first image in the carrier and make the picture nice and sharp. This takes a bit of getting used to, but once you “get it” its a snap setting it back up later. make sure that you focus on the upper or lower 1/3rd of the frame, as the natural bow for negatives you will need a deep DOF to get the front and back of the curl in focus. use ƒ8 or ƒ11. May be overkill, but it works for me.

If you are shooting color, dont take a picture yet, you need to create a custom color balance first. For E6; remove the slide, and take a blank shot. For C41; find a blank part of the strip that has only the orange mask, and take a blank shot of that. In your camera, set the blank shot as the target for your custom White Balance.*

(this would be a good place to tell you that if you really want good colors with C41; you should place an 80A tungsten filter on the lens, as it will neutralize the orange mask better than not using a filter at all. I don’t have an 80A, and it works fine most of time, but anything under artificial lights and I run out of headroom for adjusting the color balance natively in raw, I usuaually have to really pull and push pixels in photoshop and it does show.)

Now you are ready for your first shot;
When you are reviewing the image’s histogram; please take care, make sure to not overexpose with C41. Its easy to blow out the details in a C41 image because you will kill off the shadows much sooner than the histogram will indicate. If it’s your first time, you should find a ‘typical’ image, and bracket exposures to get a good idea how to read the histogram and what the typical exposure will be. It’s very different than reading a ‘normal’ histogram.

shoot shoot shoot the rest of the roll.

 

[PatrickONeill]

importing & organizing

importing & organizing

I usually make a folder on my desktop for each roll that I’m digitizing that day.

I drag and drop the card’s contents into each folder. As its copying, I usually cut and file the negatives by hand as I wait. When the card is done copying, I re-sort the files a bit

Then I fire up Adobe BridgeCS4. I grab a ‘typical’ frame and open it in ACR, and do a simple invert and contrast with the curves, It doesn’t look pretty, and it doesn’t need to. I tone and finish the images in Photoshop, not here.

Then apply the inversion and contrast settings for the rest of the rolls.

Then I sort them from frame 00 to the end of the roll. I delete duplicates, and then I rename the files.

all of my film images are sorted by /rollnumber/digitization method/Rxxx_Fxx.cr2.

I keep my file names stupidly simple. Only the Roll Number and the Frame Number; e.g. R025_F14. I don’t indicate film, camera or anything else with the file name. Those kind of details should be part of the meta-data.

Once every roll is scanned. downloaded, cleaned, and renamed in their proper folder, I then drop them into the active Library. *yeah, I was in a rush and misspelled ‘Libary’ for the folder name, I really don’t want to bother with fix it right now =p *

I fire up Lightroom 2.whatever. and refresh the Film folder.

Import like you usually do. and boom! everything now is in your DAM workflow. (Digital Asset Management, like you didn’t already know)

Then tag & sort & rank & place them in sets & etc your files as you would with any of your digital files. make it easy to find what you want. All info on camera stuff, shoot info, captions, dates etc are in the keywords; not in the file names.

 

[PatrickONeill]

processing, toning, and making web-ready jpgs.

Now, you may be asking yourself as you look at the images in the lightroom grid; My God! these images look like crap! of course they do, you really only ‘work’ the keepers, don’t waste time with the images that don’t make the cut.

so, I find my selects (the images I’m happy with) and then develop them a bit more in lightroom, just getting the contrast and color balance look somewhat decent. When I’m happy with what I got, I open up PhotshopCS4. (as a 16bit, ProRGB overkilling mofo of a tiff, but I need lots of bitdepth headroom for what I’m about to do).

Now, since I didn’t use a true macro lens, I have introduced a bit of distortion that needs some fixing; (the canon ef 50mm ƒ1.8 has a disturbing amount of distortion for a 50mm btw...) I have a photoshop action that corrects this. actually its just the automation of. Filter>Distort>Lens correction. pincushion 2%. OK. Lightroom 3 users have the option to correct this in lightroom.

Then I open up some curves adjustments, and play with it some more. first with each color channel, then with the overall rgb curve.

Now, its really, really close. and most of the time; it’s dead on. If I really can’t get it to look just right. I flatten the image and select around the image (trimming out the frame holder and blank space) and just Image>Auto Tone. lazy, yes. but I don’t want to spend hours fiddling around unless it is something needing that kind of attention.

next, I save and close Photoshop. in lightroom, I have a custom export setting that will create a jpg and import it into the same directory as the file. so. instead of a hard-drive full of large TIFF’s, I create an 8bit, AdobeRGB jpg files from the tiff. and then delete the tiff.

ALMOST THERE! I SWEAR
Did you notice that I did not crop or straighten anything yet? thats because 1. so I can be consistent about fixing lens distortion, and I want a non destructive way to straighten and crop images.

So, go back into the develop module in lightroom, and crop and straighten the jpg. NOW you are ready to export.

export

tada!

now, if you are really particular about meta-data, open up filmtagger.app and add your nerdtasticly meta-data ready for flickr.

and there you go!

 

[PatrickONeill]

This setup works well for me. I do have to say that this is only a hold-over until I get a true film scanner. I might continue to use this copy camera technique to just proof my rolls, and then my selects will be run through a proper scanner. time will tell.

 

[Roger Vadim]

great & helpfull! thanx for posting.

 

[LKeithR]

Wow, now I know for sure why I shoot digital. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate and admire the effort you've put into perfecting your process but I simply wouldn't have the patience to go through this with every roll of film I shot; especially knowing that a digital only workflow is more streamlined. I shot film for the best part of 40 years and I still get the occasional urge to fire off a roll or two of B&W--which I've lately managed to resist--but, given the great colour results one can achieve with digital these days I just don't see the point of colour film...

 

[bensyverson]

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate and admire the effort you've put into perfecting your process but I simply wouldn't have the patience to go through this with every roll of film I shot; especially knowing that a digital only workflow is more streamlined.

Who says you need to digitize every frame you shoot?

I will concede that shooting digital gives you a faster workflow. But if speed is the only criterion that matters, then McDonald's must be the finest restaurant in the world.

 

[tapesonthefloor]

This is unbelievably thorough. Nice work, Patrick.

 

[Archiver]

Big thumbs up, Patrick. I have been thinking about doing this very thing myself. Thank you for the step by step procedures.

 

[Doug]

Good explanation that I expect will be useful, thanks!

 

[shimokita]

Thanks Patrick...

I am just getting (more) serious about re-starting with medium format but have held back a little because because of the lack of a (personal) scanning solution. That and other projects on the burner... My current scanner is 135 format only.

As we all know it's just a matter of time - hahaha, but this approach may be one way to move ahead without any additional investment for now (plus one less excuse not to shoot more 120 format film...).

Should be a fun weekend ;-)

Casey

 

[shadowfox]

Patrick, good job!

As DSLRs increases in resolution and DR coverage, this method will also increase in quality that it can produce.

I still can see some loss of highlights in the scan above, but that's still miles better than my scanning 35mm strip on my flatbed scanner (Microtek i800).

Have you experimented with shooting the frame twice to capture the shadows and highlights respectively, then combine them with (I hate to mention this) HDR techniques? I bet the result will be better than mutiple scans on a flatbed.

 

[nanntonaku]

i do this to digitize my 120 slide film for flickr, only i use a canon a620 point n shoot😱. it works pretty well and its quick.

snap, load into pc, crop, balance curves and i'm done.

it sounds stupid, why shoot 120 if you're going to scan it with a pointnshoot, but i figure that if i ever get to the point where i absolutely positively must have the superest duperest quality for some reason, exhibit (yeah right) or something else,.... then by that time i could probably afford to get it drum scanned and blown up real massive.

Patrick, for c41 you might try colorperfect, a photoshop plugin,... i've only used the trial as i dont shoot 120 neg much yet, but its alot faster converting, especially with their film database presets. i think you could cut out one step in your workflow with it.

 

[PatrickONeill]

Thanks for all of the comments on the process, This is, by all means, a compromise technique, and there is more I can get out of the process if I really want to spend the money on "doing it right."

I'm still on the fence to either upgrade my lightbox and lens (Leica 60 Macro-Elmarit-R w/ adaptor) or to get a pulsetek scanner.

... Have you experimented with shooting the frame twice to capture the shadows and highlights respectively, then combine them with (I hate to mention this) HDR techniques? I bet the result will be better than mutiple scans on a flatbed.

I've tried HDR techniques with scanning. I find it to be most effective with slide film, where it is easy to lose detail in the highlights and the shadows during digitization. Its not so much an issue with c-41 and B&W where I can fit the entire range of tones in a single capture.

the blown out highlights in this example is more due to the "auto tone" feature in photoshop where it clips the whites and blacks. I was felling lazy and let the software do the heavy lifting.

Even when I use HDR to digitize a frame, a lot of the benefits of better shadow and highlight detail gets lost when the scans are saved down for web display, which is my primary use for this digitization technique. For now, if I want a file that is decent enough to print, I will have to go with a local pro lab for big scans.