First foray into the DYI digital darkroom...

[spmc]

Hello- I am pretty much new to to film, and photography in general. My interest was awakened by an old (1947) ANSCO box camera that found it's way into my house. It's pretty much a box with a simple meniscus lens, fixed aperture, mechanical shutter (1 speed), and manual film transport. It shoots 120 film with a massive 6x9cm frame. I've shot a couple roles of Ilford HP-5 Plus and developed the negatives at home.

 

I've spent some time noodling on methods for scanning the negatives. I thought I was doing pretty good with an older but pretty well-spec'd multifunction Epson machine, but kept getting a parallel light-dark banding pattern in the scan direction. I tried all kinds of masking and back lighting variations but couldn't consistently eliminate the pattern.

 

So I changed it up, entirely, to photographing the negatives with an Olympus TG-4 digital camera in the "microscope" mode using an LED tracing pad as a light box and a 3D printed negative holder. I shot the set below with the light box at max brightness and the camera set to it's lowest ISO (100), letting the camera decide the aperture and shutter speed for each shot. I used the stock Windows tools (Paint and Photo) to manipulate the scanned negatives into what looked pretty balanced on my computer screen, however, when I put the put the pictures up on my 50" TV, they look overly bright and a little washed out.

 

Anyway, more experimentation to come, but this is where I am at with my only new gear purchased so far being the light pad

[spmc]

Sorry about the upside down post. When I tried to edit to move the pictures to bottom of the post, the spam filter intervened.

[kmac]

Excellent work - thanks for posting

[John Seaman]

Good stuff. You will do well to mask off the unused part of the light pad, also do the shots with as little external light as possible as light reflected off the surface of the negative will cause flare and reduce contrast. Perhaps you have already done this.

[rodeo_joe1]

You need an image editor with a 'Curves' tool to make the pictures pop.

 

The free Gimp is one such.

 

When printed on photographic paper, negatives are automatically given an S-shaped tone curve by the paper characteristics. This needs to be emulated in a digital copy to give the pictures enough mid-tone contrast without blowing out the highlights or making the shadows a blocked up uniform black.

 

The editor that came with my Android phone has a curves tool, but I don't think it's available as a separate app.

 

'Curves' allows you to make improvements like this:

[spmc]

Thank you very much for the encouragement and advice, guys! So much to learn.

[AlanKlein]

I show a lot of my pictures on my 75" UHDTV. Keep in mind that there are different settings on the TV that will change the way it looks. More or less contrast, more or less saturation, etc. In other words, the TV is calibrated just like any other display monitor.

 

First, though, you have to make sure that the initial monitor is showing the right exposure, colors, contrast, and lighting. So calibrate your computer's monitor, if possible. Then you can use a post processing program like Joe mentioned or some other to get the image to look like your like it on the computer monitor. That would be your base display. Then, whether you display on a TV or put on the web, the picture will display just the way you want it too.

 

Then go to a "neutral" setting on the TV or set it up how you like it to display. There are usually a number of different selections. You can use one of them for showing slides. Good luck.

[spmc]

Alright. I have spent a good part of my day of messing around with GIMP. I think I'm getting better.

 

[kmac]

Yes, better.

 

I did a quick levels job on the boats plus some. The Black point and White point were brought in to the ends of the histogram (Auto Levels worked fine)

 

A little extra brightening by Mid Tone, then a little extra of both Exposure and Contrast, then a little sharpening.

 

 

[spmc]

Thanks kmac! That was super helpful. Here's my latest of the boats.