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Scanning Film In Acetate Sleeves To Make Contact Sheets


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<p>Hello everyone,<br>

We have some film we we'd like to scan and print out into contact sheets. We've tried two different scanners (Epson XP-410 and Canon Flatbed 100) with poor results in each. The contact sheets don't have to be great but decent would be nice. Any advise? <br>

The 2 main thing we'd like to accomplish is: 1) Not take the film out of the acetate sleeves; 2) Print out decent contact sheets (both color and b&w from negative film). Thank you for you time. </p>

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You'll need to scan the naked film, without the

protective sleeves. No way around that. Been

there, done that, many, many times. Got the foggy

looking contact sheets to show for my attempts to

save time, dating back to the 1970s when clear

plastic sleeves replaced glassine envelopes. Same

with recently trying to scan some b&w darkroom

prints without removing them from the clear

plastic envelopes I'd stored them in. There's

always a slight telltale fog and softness.

 

Scanning or contact printing inside sleeves is

strictly for handy identification of the photos,

not for quality scans or contact prints.

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You'll need to scan the naked film, without the

protective sleeves. No way around that. Been

there, done that, many, many times. Got the foggy

looking contact sheets to show for my attempts to

save time, dating back to the 1970s when clear

plastic sleeves replaced glassine envelopes. Same

with recently trying to scan some b&w darkroom

prints without removing them from the clear

plastic envelopes I'd stored them in. There's

always a slight telltale fog and softness.

 

Scanning or contact printing inside sleeves is

strictly for handy identification of the photos,

not for quality scans or contact prints.

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<p>Contact prints are mainly to identify and catalog photos, and don't need to be pristine, suitable for magnification. Bare film might be nice, but unless you have a holder to keep then flat, straight and separated, things get a bit chaotic in practice. Closing the lid on this untethered array tends to sweep them into disorder by air pressure and static. I keep my negatives in binder sheets which hold seven strips of six frames (35mm). I am fortunate to have an older scanner (Epson 1600) which has a bed large enough to encompass the entire sheet. Smaller scanner beds are more typical, so plan on two scans per roll of 36-40 frames. This is compounded by the almost unalterable compulsion of lab technicians to cut your film into strips of four (unless you skip frames, then expect to get onesies and twosies in the mix).</p>

<p>If you want a useable "contact sheet" in the electronic age, scan each frame individually, full sized, and compose the contact sheet in software. I'm not going to suggest you learn to "read" negatives in the raw, because after over 50 years, I still find that skill elusive.</p>

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<p>For some people, a contact sheet is a precious thing - they like to see rows of perfect little pictures (even to the extent of shading individual negs in the darkroom) and they peruse their contact sheets with a magnifier in the belief that sharpness can be judged in this way (in fact you can see above all the paper grain). I personally like b+w contact sheets that show all the available tones (in other words, printed very soft) and which are cheap enough to be regarded as disposable (i.e. I can strike through unusable images with a felt-tip pen and mark crop lines on good shots). As such I am happy to scan whole films in a transparent sleeve (big advantage - one less negative handling stage) - if I want to try to judge sharpness, I look at the film with a lupe. Yes of course you can scan each frame individually and make a contact sheet in Photoshop ... IF you can take approx. 90 to 120 minutes or more per 36-exposure film to do this. I most certainly can't!</p>
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<p>I have a Nikon 4000 with a roll feeder, which can scan strips unattended from 3 to 40 frames in length (onesies/twosies require a different holder). It was a sad day when Nikon discontinued that scanner. They stopped updating their drivers with Win XP too. VueScan or Silverfast will work with Win7/8, but I cannot use it with my work station, which won't recognize the scanner with either FireWire card. Fortunately, I have a laptop with the right kind of FireWire compatibility for scanning, using Silverfast 8 Studio. It takes 45 minutes to an hour to scan an entire roll at high resolution.</p>

<p>My "contact sheet" is Lightroom 5, which can be coaxed into printing a contact sheet complete with file names. I phrase it that way because it isn't a discrete command, rather configuration of another printing function. Customers find contact sheets useful when selecting from a large group of images without benefit of Bridge or Lightroom.</p>

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  • 3 years later...
<p> I keep my negatives in binder sheets which hold seven strips of six frames (35mm). I am fortunate to have an older scanner (Epson 1600) which has a bed large enough to encompass the entire sheet. </p>

Ed,

I have an Epson 1660 and would appreciate some additional detail on how you get your sleeved negatives scanned. Does your lid have a light source that covers the entire bed? (mine has only a light for a single strip of film or 4 slides). Are you shining a light through the glass and images? Are you scanning in transparency/film negative mode? I am trying to use VueScan (my Epson software and drivers went walkabout during some hardware upgrade). I've not been able to figure out the settings to enable getting a full-bed scan in transparency (non-reflective) mode. The software seems to only 'look' where it knows that the scanner has a light in the lid. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

-cj

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

PNet cautions members to search for existing threads for relevance, before starting a new one. A few people seem to take that seriously.

 

Contact sheets made sense in the darkroom age, since negatives can be hard to "read" even for experienced photographers. There were even fixtures to align film strips for this purpose. I think I tried it once or twice before seeing the folly of it. Before going digital in the early 21st centure, I was even tempted to scan film in sleeves for the same purpose. Thousands of rolls of film and tight deadlines at the newspaper were a powerful incentive for learning to read negatives. I even learned to read set type, backwards and reversed. (Not the Linotype keyboard though. There were standard typewriter keyboards that could be attached when the regular operators were unavailable.)

  • It's hard to line up sleeves, like arranging grasshoppers.
  • Archival pages have too much space between strips
  • I use strips of 6, but even strips of 4 were too wide for some flatbeds
  • Exposure is tricky, because there is so much area outside the actual image
  • Automatic frame detection doesn't seem to work, due to variable alignment and excessive blank areas

Since so much time is devoted to preparing film for scanning, and documenting the roll and frame information, it makes more sense to scan for keeps, and create thumbnails (contact sheets) in software. Doing all of that for strips in sleeves or folders takes just as much time, but with little to show for your efforts.

 

For what it's worth, my Epson 1600 is still working, and does indeed have full-width backlight for film scanning, a cold-cathode lamp which moves parallel to the scanning head. Furthermore the bed is a full 8.5" and 14" long (legal size). It's only slightly smaller than a bath tub. The scanner I actually use daily is 1" thick, 8.4"x11", for reflective copy only, and cost about $90.

 

I no longer use film, but have hundreds of rolls in archival pages, never scanned. I'm slowly catching up, but using a digital camera with a macro lens rather then a large, slow, noisy Nikon scanner (I have two). I use the same software as before, Silverfast, to process negative images. Slides need little, if any processing.

Edited by Ed_Ingold
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The 1600 didn't focus automatically. It had two settings, +0 mm for reflective scans and +2 mm for transparencies. Holding film at the right height was not in capability of the supplied holders. Even so, 1600 ppi advertised (1200 effective) is not exactly overwhelming. The 11x17" version, model 10000 had continuous auto/manual focusing, but no better resolution.

 

It is great for documents, however. I still use it for copying and character recognition.

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