Scanning How to

[Lewoke]

Hello,

I recently started to work for a rather small archive (traditional job for us history students).  This archive sits on a beautiful collection of old mostly 35mm negative film. All though they have a capable film scanner,  nobody ever digitized these negatives properly – except for the occasional jpeg scan with 300dpi – because  you know most of the people working there are rather old and not really technology savvy.  In my spare time I started to tinker around with scanner and after a bit trial and error I managed to get somewhat acceptable results. Still there is a lot of room for improvement. Since I know that some people here in the forum have a vast knowledge on this topic I would like to ask if any of you have some recommendations in terms of literature, internet resources, blogs etc. on this topic. Especially on the aspect of preservation (workflow, do's and don'ts, theory and practice)

Thanks in advance

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Everything you ever wanted to know about scanning:

https://www.scantips.com/

[jmlphotography]

A straight forward, clear guide: http://www.kennethleegallery.com/html/scanning/index.php

Good luck.

[Garnick]

In most if not all cases a good quality scan depends on the scanning application as much as the scanner itself.  For many years I've been using Silverfast Scanning software from here - https://www.silverfast.com/ with excellent results for both reflective and transparent(film) materials on an Epson V750 scanner.  I also use an older Epson Expression 1680 with Silverfast for oversized originals.  For 35mm film I was using a Nikon 4000ED scanner and produced great scans with the Nikon Scan software until Nikon decided to stop supporting Nikon Scan.  Recently I've been experimenting with VueScan for the 4000ED but so far not impressed with that combo.  Probably need to experiment further with some of the settings. 

The other two excellent suggestions are a good place to start as well.  However, one issue I have with the Kenneth Lee approach is in the verbiage.  He tends to replace the word Pixel with the word Dot when referring to the resolution of a scanned image.  It is true that VueScan uses DPI in lieu of PPI when referring to scan reolution, which of course is also incorrect.  To the best of my knowledge scanned images as well as camera images and those from image editing programs etc. are created with Pixels, not Dots.  I realize some would say I'm nit picking on this, but it's something that has always been like the sound of fingernails on a blackboard to see both PPI and DPI combined in the DPI heading, simply due to laziness.  As we all realize, PPI refers to the image, where as DPI refers to the print.  Printers print DOTS, not PIXELS.  My mini rant 

[Jim Metzger]

I would also look into photographing the negatives with a digital camera, high megapixels is good. There are any number of online articles on how to do this. I am fortunate enough to have an old Nikon PB6 bellows with film holder. I use this on a D810 with a really old Micro Nikkor 55mm lens. A flash set in front of the rig provides repeatable lighting.

A curves reversal in Photoshop will give you a good starting point for working on the image.

I also have a Nikon 4000ED scanner and using a camera is much, much quicker.

Thank you for preserving the past.

Jim