120 Film Scanning Workflow?

[patrick_j.]

hello --

 

being relatively new to scanning in general i am wondering if some of you would be willing to share their workflow with me? i am still trying

to adjust to get a somewhat efficient flow that suits my need, which is mostly online display for mere pleasure, rather than business. so

this is what i do right now:

 

1.) i scan my slides or negatives using epson scan (though something makes me want to like silverfast but i am not there yet) in strips at

400dpi. i end up with 4 strips of 3 frames which i use as some sort of contact sheet

 

2.) i do as little as possible processing in the scanner software

 

3.) i import those strips in lightroom for organisation

 

4.) i review the "contact" and the frames i like i crop out as a single frame and post-process in LR and or PS if i need extra control

 

5.) i keep essentially the 4 strips of contact plus the individual frames i chose in one folder/album for archiving

 

6.) enjoy

 

7.) if i ever wanted to print a frame i would go back and got the frame scanned professionally on a drum scanner or simply at higher

resolution.

 

how do you solve the archiving and processing workflow and what software do you use?

 

thanks in advance for your time.

[nobuya_i1]

So you are scanning at 400dpi? Is this a typo and you actually meant 4000dpi?

 

A fundamental problem in film scanning is its laborious nature. Therefore, a lot of people who are more or less experienced (ie, learned it the hard way) try to scan only once, archive the original scans, and work on the copies of the original files.

 

My workflow:

1. Scan at 4000dpi into a 16-bit tiff file.

2. Apply necessary edits in Photoshop, only in adjustment layers, and save the file (500MB to 1GB per file) to at least two different storage devices.

3. Reduce size and apply sharpening on duplicate files for specific purposes (web viewing, computer displays, printing, etc.).

 

As for contact sheets, which I create only for negatives, I use a digital camera to take a pic of the film sleeve placed on the light table and use Photoshop to invert and color correct the pic (I've made an action for this so it's a one-click process).

 

The point, again, is to scan only once.

[patrick_j.]

helle nobuya -- i am embarrassed to say but not a typo. :P the reason is that screen viewing at this point is really my only

intent and i feel that 500MB-1GB per file seems excessive as a pre-emptive approach. but i do hear you on the laborious

nature of it and that scanning *once* might be a ultimately the only valid approach. that being said, from what you said, i

assume you only scan the frames you deem good for archiving and leave the rest alone, right?

 

thanks again for sharing your process, it really helps to see how others do it and learn from it.

[nobuya_i1]

Hi Patrick. Let me attempt one more time… : )

 

. . . screen viewing at this point is. . .

 

My first scanning experience was with an old Polaroid unit at my work. I was pretty satisfied at that point with the results I was getting until I bought a Nikon Coolscan 4ED, a decent and certainly better scanner. Since it was a superior scanner, it compelled me to re-do the scanning I had done with the Polaroid. I didn’t think ahead at that time; I scanned to the screen viewing resolution (I already had prints of the frames I liked), applied all edits on the originals, and saved everything in jpeg. Meanwhile, my scanning and post-processing skills/knowledge had dramatically improved during the Nikon scanner’s tenure. I also realized that I would be able to make better prints from good scans more easily than from the chemical processing (so bye-bye to the screen viewing resolution scanning). In short, the scans from the preceding few years were deemed total waste. By this time it became quite – painfully – clear to me that I would save myself from a tremendous amount of agony by scanning in the highest quality permissible. I simply needed to create high-quality, unprocessed files by scanning at 2700dpi (the scanner’s max resolution) and saving files in 16-bit TIFFs.

 

I went through a similar process with the 120 scanning, albeit in a smaller scale. 500mb – 1GB per frame may sound excessive, but I only shoot and process about one roll of 120 film each month, so even if I decide to scan all twelve 6x6 frames (I seldom do this) in the highest quality and add Photoshop layers, the scanned files are asking for only about 12GB of disk space (or 24GB in two disks) which isn’t terribly expensive these days.

 

The morale of the story is that our needs and skills change over time. Of course, it’s arguable that the technology also changes so there is no such thing as the “highest quality scan” that prevails over time. When it comes to flatbed or dedicated film scanners, however, I feel that we are really at the end of meaningful (discernable) progress in quality that a good scan today will remain so 10 years from now.

[mike pirie]

Hi guys,

 

I have a very similar workflow to that used by Patrick; scan at relatively low res, use the image for reference/contact sheet purposes in LR and then rescan at high res if printing is required.

 

I have 31 years worth of analogue photography to scan and reference in LR, so the prospect of scanning everything at 4000dpi in the hope that i may use them in future is not feasible. Once the scans are in LR I can catalogue and classify them. That's my long Norwegian winter evenings project!

 

Mike

[patrick_j.]

thank you to the both of you for your thoughtful answers. i spent some time scanning this weekend and i suppose the

low-res and high-res if needed approach works better in my case. at a resolution of 400dpi i get enough for basic web

publishing without the rather massive of storage required for full res scans. that being said though i do see the merits of

both approaches. it is certainly conceivable that the medium will evolve and that these scans might pathetic in a short

amount of time. i found though that the time is also an issue. een scanning multipass at 400dpi takes time :-)

 

regardless though, thank you so much to the both of you.

[mikereys]

<p>Have just done my first ones and I must say that I'm not inclined to scan at 4000dpi yet as I first would like to get my complete workflow under control.<br>

Questions I have is, what about adding metadata in an effective way? Do you scan directly into LR, and how does one deal with splitting the film strip (LR is non-destructive). Do you keep tiff, convert to DNG, compressed - full,...?</p>

[david_henderson]

<p>Is there any merit for you in considering whether its worthwhile scanning all of your MF slides at all? You can see what they look like, and could select that proportion which you might in future wish to view on screen. <br>

For years I shot only MF transparencies and probably 10-12% of what I shot were filed in the "might be used " system , about half were thrown away and the remainder in the " don't want to dump it but I'll probably never use it" system. I've only been in that system a dozen times in as many years . Which goes to show that for me anyway it's been possible to select at the outset those images that are going to be candidates for something without too much changing of mind later, and I could quite easily get by just scanning the best 15% max of what I take. Frankly its not the storage that bothers me- another couple of terabyte drives isn't going to cost a lot right now- its the tedious nature of the work in scanning that I'd want to avoid. </p>

<p>I can understand scanning all the negs. if you need to do that to even see which ones yoy like best, though I must admit that I'd be tempted to get a contact sheet that would enable me to adopt a similar selection policy as for slides. </p>

<p>If you only intend ever to print a tiny proportion of what you scan (irrespective of your initial scanning policy) then to me its a no brainer to scan for the screen initially and then if you decide later to print a very small proportion of them, then get a high res scan made on a film scanner. As a side issue, the "scan once for any future purpose" philosophy seems initially to have been promoted by labs selling high res drum scans by the megabyte- it's certainly not appropriate for work where the probability of ever using it on other than a screen is measured in very small percentages. </p>

<p>I agree also with minimising the post processing in the scanner software, but I would take it further. I wouldn't carry out <strong><em>any </em></strong>processing until I knew that I was going to use that image. That way I'd reckon to avoid processing at all on maybe half of the images I scanned (ie those I thought I may want to use but never did) and what's more, whenever I spent time on an image I'd know that I was doing it because it was necessary, not because of some arcane routine, at which point I can bring more enthusiasm to bear. </p>